Only weeks removed from lung surgery, linebacker T.J. Watt maybe surprised some by taking on a heavy workload in his first game back, but defensive coordinator Terryl Austin was not among them.
“I’m not surprised with anything I get from T.J. just because I know the way the guy’s always in shape,” Austin said Thursday at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex. “So, he had a setback (in his season), but it wasn’t one of those things where you worry about him getting so far out of shape he wouldn’t be able to work.”
Still, Austin predicted Watt will be closer to his usual self when the Steelers host the Houston Texans in a wild card game on Monday night at Acrisure Stadium.
Watt had no sacks in the Steelers’ 26-24 victory over the Baltimore Ravens last Sunday but did make a key third-quarter interception. He played on 84.3% of the team’s defensive snaps.
“It was good to get 43 snaps out of him,” Austin said. “I wasn’t really counting. It was up to him about, ‘How do you feel?’ A few times during the game I just walked by and said, ‘How, how you feeling? You good?’ He was like, ‘Yep, I’m good to go.’ I’ll trust him. If he tells me he’s good to go, he’s good to go.”
Austin said there is more to being a good edge rusher than conditioning, skills like timing that suffer when sitting out for nearly a month like Watt did. Watt missed three games because of his partially collapsed lung, sustained during a dry needling treatment.
“Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, I’ll just come back in and be the same guy I was,’” Austin said. “It’s going to take you a minute to get your legs underneath you (and) get used to the timing of everything. People don’t realize how much pass rush is about timing and hand usage. There’s a whole bunch that goes into it.
“As you get back into the game, you have to get those things working again. I assume he’ll be better this week.”
