Pittsburgh Released Its Veteran Safety. Baltimore Signed Him. That's the Secondary Story Right There.
The offseason plan for Pittsburgh's secondary was straightforward enough: sign veteran depth, get Jalen Ramsey and Joey Porter Jr. healthy, and build a back end capable of sustaining the kind of comfortable defensive margins the organization had publicly committed to chasing. For a few weeks, it looked like it was working. Now a former Steeler safety just signed with the Baltimore Ravens — the team Pittsburgh is chasing in the AFC North — and the secondary depth that was supposed to be the insurance policy is looking thinner than the front office would like to admit.
Start with what the depth chart actually says. Behind Jaquan Brisker at the DB position, Pittsburgh lists Doneiko Slaughter and Marte Mapu. Those are not names that inspire confidence in a 10-games-left contention push. The Steelers released Rayshawn Jenkins last week, and within days he was absorbed by a division rival. Whatever the internal reasoning for that move, the external optics are difficult: you cut a veteran safety, Baltimore picks him up, and your own depth behind the starters is now three names deep with question marks attached to each of them.
The context that makes this sting is the offseason itself. Pittsburgh spent real capital fortifying the secondary precisely because the position was identified as a vulnerability. Both Ramsey and Porter Jr. began training camp on the PUP list — a fact I was tracking from the moment it broke in late July — and the veteran depth signings were the organization's acknowledgment that it couldn't afford to wait on those two. Ramsey is active now. Porter Jr. is active. The plan, to that extent, held. But the veteran safety layer that was supposed to sit underneath them has been peeled back, and the Jenkins release is the most visible evidence of that erosion.
What makes this a structural concern rather than a personnel footnote is the pattern around it. The defensive line just lost Sebastian Joseph-Day to injured reserve. The receiver room has been so depleted that Pittsburgh signed Marquez Valdes-Scantling to patch the holes. Mike McCarthy spent halftime in a medical tent. The point differential is holding at plus-2.1 per game, and the Steelers are 5-2 and on a three-game winning streak — those numbers are real and they matter. But last season's team went 7-3 in close games and still finished with a point differential that projected them as a .500 club. The wins were there; the margin underneath them was not. The front office identified that gap as the problem to solve. Releasing a safety who immediately signs with your division rival is not how you solve it.
My read is this: Pittsburgh is winning right now despite the attrition, not because the roster construction has held. The secondary, specifically, was the position the organization invested in hardest during the offseason, and it is now the position where the depth has visibly thinned. Ten games remain, the AFC North is competitive, and the back end of this defense is being held together by two veterans who spent the summer on the PUP list and a depth chart that just got raided by Baltimore. The comfortable margins the Steelers promised themselves are still showing up in the box score. Whether the secondary can keep them there is a different question entirely.