The Sad Saga of the Pittsburgh Steelers Secondary

This week, Cortez Allen was released by the Pittsburgh Steelers only two years into a five year deal worth $26 million, half of it fully guaranteed, winning him the Donnell Woolford / Deuce Staley Memorial Clipboard of Uselessness. It's rare for Pittsburgh to so quickly admit a fuckup of this magnitude, but it's possible that the Steelers have finally realized their long history of terrible personnel moves and inability to draft top talent at one of the most important positions on the gridiron. Despite fielding some of the best defenses in the NFL for much of the last 20 years, not one Steeler corner has even managed to achieve the dubious honor of a Pro Bowl berth since Rod Woodson's last season with the team in 1996, despite the Pro Bowl voting's domination by idiot fans and the Steelers' immense popularity.

My brother and I decided to go through the litany of terrible DBs the Steelers have trotted out over the years, and it took nearly an hour. The back-and-forth texts seemed as endless as the Catalog of Ships in Homer's "Illiad," or the Book of Chronicles in the Old Testament. Here's my list of the ten worst Pittsburgh Steeler cornerbacks of the last twenty years. I've confined the scorn to starters and players drafted in the 3rd round or higher since 1997.

1. Donnell Woolford (1997-1998): Woolford was brought over from the Bears to replace Rod Woodson in 1997. He was considered to be a marquis free agent signing for the team who'd been a Probowler as recently as 1993, but he'd unfortunately decided to retire after the 1996 season and not inform his new employers. He flat out could not play, and washed out almost immediately. Despite this, the Carolina Panthers - at this time, under Dom Capers' mismanagement, a retirement home for Blitzburgh alumni from the early 90s - picked him up and gave him a check for a couple of years. I'm sure Donnell Woolford mentions Capers in his prayers nightly.

2. Dewayne Washington (1998-2003):

Carl Pickens, defining the career of Dewaye Washington in 1998.

His was a tale of sorrow. Shortly after Washington was signed in the 1998 offseason to fill the colossal hole Donnell Woolford had sucked open in the secondary, a pair of Viking fans came to the video store where I worked. I was probably wearing my Kordell Stewart jersey (to be later burned in the front yard at some point in 1999), so the guy pipes up with, "Hey you guys just signed Dewayne Washington I heard," with a knowing grin. At the time, the Pittsburgh press was abuzz with the new signing and largely complimentary. "He's ok, but he just always seems to be the guy getting burned at the worst possible times." Prophetic words.

Dewayne Washington would become one of the Steelers I hated most. It wasn't necessarily his fault that his tenure happened to coincide with one of the most interminably mediocre eras in modern Steeler football, but he definitely did his part to define the futility of those years. The defining Dewayne moment for me was when hated former Steeler Super Bowl QB Neil O'Donnell, then with the equally hated Bengals, burned poor Dewayne with a fake spike game winning TD pass to Carl Pickens, who then talked shit to Dewayne as he lay humiliated on the turf. In an era when it was still legal to maul receivers during their routes in man-to-man coverage, Dewayne was the routinely posterized bitch of many a big receiver of the era.

3. Chad Scott (1997-2004): Scott was a first round pick who became just a guy. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't a standout. If the best thing you can say about a corner is "good tackler," he basically sucks. That's about the best thing I can say about Chad Scott. Everyone caught the ball on him, but hey he could make sure they didn't run very far afterwards. That and the Steelers' horrible draft picks at his position over the years (see Poteat, Hank below) meant that Chad Scott's sorry ass kept getting the starting job by simply showing up for work every autumn. He ended up joining the Patriots in 2005 and 2006 after the Steelers let him walk, and probably not coincidentally they were two of the rare post-2001 Patriots seasons in which Tom Brady didn't at least make it to a Super Bowl.

4. Hank Poteat (2000-2003): Poteat played well for Pitt. This meant that yinzer fans in 2000 thought he was going to be the next Rod Woodson - I actually read this in one column at the time. This is probably also what induced the Steelers, following two boring years of hideous failure during the First Kordell Stewart Dark Age, to draft him in the 3rd round: let's give the fans something to cheer about after they're done booing another Kordell Stewart three-and-out. Hank Poteat was shit in human form. He was also the beginning of about 15 years of terrible 2nd and 3rd round draft picks in the secondary and was gone by 2003 after posting a whopping 28 tackles in three years. He must have had a great agent, because he managed to occupy the lower echelons of the rosters of four other NFL teams for almost a decade before finally reaching the end of the road with the Cleveland Browns in 2011. In over a decade of work, Hank Poteat had four interceptions.

5. Ike Taylor (2003-2014):

No explanation needed.

I hate Ike Taylor. Like Chad Scott before him, Taylor managed to triumph in camp over incredibly weak draft picks on an annual basis and assemble what has to be one of the longest careers as a starter by a bad corner in the history of the league. Expectations, by the time he arrived, were very low. The Steelers had been trotting out the likes of the four guys above for almost a decade. He looked like just another wasted mid-round Steeler cornerback draft pick for his first two years, but in year three, 2005, he managed to crack the starting lineup and hold down the position for the entire year, even playing well in the playoffs and in the Super Bowl. "HOLY FUCKING SHIT," thought the entire Pittsburgh front office, "WE FOUND ONE! HE IS THE LIGHT AND THE WAY!" so they gave Ike a massive deal to start the 2006 season, making him the highest paid corner in the history of the team.

Ike rewarded that confidence by immediately turning into total garbage in 2006, eventually losing his job to Deshea Townsend in week 10, and he was an up-and-down player ever thereafter. His biggest problem was possibly the worst hands in the NFL. You could float a ball directly into Ike's waiting arms with no one anywhere near him, and he would find a way to drop it. I remember one training camp when he carried around one of those cup-and-ball toys in the pathetic and ultimately vain hope of developing better hand-eye coordination. He worked with the receivers in camp in 2008 for the same reason, which must have been really hilarious to watch, but to no avail. In fact, just about every off season while Ike Taylor was with the Steelers you could find some sad story about how he was doing something stupid in the hope of somehow learning to close his rocklike hands around a football on the field, but all for naught: Ike Taylor could not catch footballs. In 12 seasons as a starter, he managed only 19 interceptions.

Despite assembling a resume which showed that the only thing he could do consistently was drop easily catchable interceptions, the Steelers AGAIN rewarded Taylor with a massive contract - 4 years, $28 million - before the 2011 season. Ike Taylor spent most of the year showing that this had been a very bad idea, culminating in one of the most humiliating, disgustingly embarrassing defensive lapses ever committed by a member of the team: getting updated by Tim Tebow in the playoffs. The ignominy that his performance brought down on Steeler Nation cannot ever be forgiven. He will be forever remembered, flailing his arms uselessly, terribly out of position, as Tim Tebow lofted the game winning pass over his head. MOTHERFUCK Ike Taylor.

6. Ricardo Colclough (2004-2008): Colclough is one of four defensive backs the Steelers drafted in the 2nd or 3rd rounds from 1999 to 2011 to have played fewer four or fewer years for the team. Drafted in the 2nd round, Colclough was an immediately obvious bust.

7. Bryant McFadden (2005-2008, 2010-2011):

Thanks for the memory.

One of very few Steelers to be brought back from exile in Arizona (the other being fellow adequate veteran cornerback Willie Gay), retirement home for Pittsburgh players good and bad since they started hiring all of our former coordinators as head coaches. McFadden was the Steelers 2nd round pick the year after Colclough, and while he wasn't a complete bust like Colclough, he wasn't a reliable starter even at nickelback. I'll give him credit for having one great play in his career: the breakup on Manning's pass to Reggie Wayne at the end of the Steelers' playoff victory over the Colts in 2005. It's not well remembered, but if McFadden doesn't make that play, the Steelers don't go on to beat the Seahawks in Super Bowl XL. Aaron Rodgers later made him his bitch in the playoffs both when he was with Arizona in 2009 and in the Steelers' last Super Bowl appearance in 2010, and that was about it for McFadden. 

8. Curtis Brown (2011-2014): Brown was another relatively high complete bust pick, taken in the third round in 2011. He managed 1 interception in his 3 year, totally meaningless career.

9. Cortez Allen (2011-2015): After committing the colossal gaffe of letting the ONLY decent cornerback drafted in the 21st century, 2009 3rd round pick Keenan Lewis, walk out the door and join the Saints in 2011, the Steelers doubled down on their mistake by panicking and giving Cortez Allen a huge contract in 2014 after he'd started a grand total of 11 games in his previous three years. The Steelers believed he'd been ready to take the next step, and they were right, but that next step was onto an injury cart, where Allen would spend the remainder of his career in Pittsburgh.

10. Willie Gay (2007-2011, 2013-present): The saddest thing you can say about the Pittsburgh Steelers' current secondary is that Willie Gay anchored it at the age of 30. He was BY FAR the best corner on the team, albeit a team that started guys named Antwan Blake and Ross Cockrell at the position at various times during the year. Gay, like Ike Taylor, was long the beneficiary of the colossal draft failures at corner over the last 20 years, which allowed a merely serviceable veteran to stand out like a man among boys. It's shameful that the team is bringing him back at the age of 31 due to a lack of better options. Willie Gay starting in 2015 was unmistakable evidence that the Steelers secondary sucked. The fact that they decided to give Gay a three year deal last month at age 31 means that they're resigned to continuing to suck for the foreseeable future.