When Carnell Lake resigned from his position as defensive backs coach of the Steelers last week, it caught many people by surprise, including some of his players.
Count strong safety Sean Davis among them.
Davis said he was caught off guard by Lake's resignation last week but understood the reasoning Lake gave for walking away -- to spend time with his family and watch his youngest son play high school football back in California.
"Seven years is a long time," Davis said of Lake, who had been with the Steelers as an assistant coach since 2011. "I can understand completely why he would want to spend time with his family. But we'll miss him."
That might have been part of Lake's reasoning. But, Lake also might have had some help out the door. After all, after being handed cornerback Artie Burns in the first round of the 2016 draft and Davis in the second, Lake was supposed to make them two of the team's stars of the future.
Both played better in 2017 than they did the previous season. Davis led the Steelers in tackles with 90, tying for the team lead in interceptions with three, while Burns led the Steelers with 13 passes defensed. But both also need to play with more consistency, something that will be the focus of new defensive backs coach Tom Bradley.
Davis, with whom I spoke at the Pittsburgh Auto Show Friday night at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, hasn't yet met Bradley, a longtime Penn State assistant coach and the brother of Steelers team doctor James Bradley, but he's looking forward to the work ahead.
"I thought we were better (as a defense) this season than we were my rookie year," Davis told me. "But we've still got room to grow. We can still be a lot better. But I like the group that we have."
And, Davis still thinks the Steelers made some strides overall.
"Thirteen wins is tough to do in this league. And we won a lot of close games and only lost once on the road. I don't think we could have done that my rookie year."
Still, Davis understands the expectations and admits the Steelers didn't live up to them in 2017. He agreed with Kevin Colbert's assessment from earlier this week that the Steelers took a step backward in 2017. But some of the things Pittsburgh went through during the season -- including seeing teammate Ryan Shazier seriously injured at Cincinnati Dec. 4 -- will help this team in the long term.
"Man, I hope so," Davis said when I asked him if everything the Steelers went through last season will help make them a stronger team.
"We have a good young group," he added speaking specifically of the defense. "We're going to continue to grow together and get better."
From that respect, Davis, in particular, will miss Lake's guidance. A former Pro Bowl safety himself, Lake worked particularly hard with Davis. The two spent time together studying film and talking about technique, with Lake offering the guidance someone who also had played the position could offer.
Now, it will be incumbent on Davis to make himself a better player under Bradley's guidance. Davis said he took the last month off to allow his body to heal. But he'll start working out again next week on a daily basis with an eye on the season.
"Coach Lake was tough on me, no doubt," Davis said. "He spent a lot of extra time with me. He expected a lot out of me. But I expect a lot of myself."
• Is anyone really surprised the Pirates' players are upset about the team tearing up the roster from 2017?
David Freese was the latest to speak out Friday in Bradenton, Fla., saying, "The demand to win just hasn't been in the air."
I've been covering sports teams or playing sports all of my life and I'm not quite sure what Freese is talking about. You can demand to win all you want, but if you don't have the athletes, it's not going to happen. The Browns weren't going to suddenly become good last season because they "demanded" it from themselves. The Pitt basketball team isn't going to start winning games because some demand was made.
The bottom line in sports is you either have the talent or you do not. Desire to win is a nice complement to that. But desire to win without talent is as meaningless as the talent to win without desire.
Maybe the Pirates have been lacking both over the past two seasons. But one without the other means nothing.
• Yes, you can blame management for the lack of talent.
• I feel like I just made up a new John Wooden-ism. If Wooden didn't say what I just wrote about talent and desire, he probably should have.
It's a truism nonetheless.
• Getting back to Davis, he's a key player for the Steelers in 2018. If Mike Mitchell is released, as expected, Davis will become the unquestioned vocal leader on the back end of the secondary.
There's also the possibility he could be asked to slide over to free safety if the player the Steelers decide to replace Mitchell with happens to be better suited to playing strong safety than Davis. If that happens, Davis will need to become more of a ballhawk. He has four interceptions in two seasons with the Steelers, which isn't bad. But for the defense to take the next step, they need to create more than the 16 interceptions they did in 2017.
A team that led the NFL with 56 sacks should record more than one interception per game.
• Penn State's blowout over No. 8 Ohio State Thursday night was a good one and improved the Nittany Lions to 19-9. But let's tap the brakes a bit on any NCAA Tournament talk. The Nittany Lions' daily RPI per ESPN is 72. More important, they have two quality wins, both over Ohio State. Even worse, they are 8-9 against teams with RPI ratings in the top 150.
That's not good.
Certainly Penn State can do something about that in the next three games -- at Purdue Sunday, at home against Michigan Feb. 21 and at Nebraska Feb. 25 -- to close out the regular season. Penn State probably needs to win all three, or at least upset Purdue on the road and win one of the other two, to have a shot at an at-large bid.
Anything short of that or reaching the Big Ten Tournament semifinals probably won't be good enough to beef up a resume that includes 11 wins over cupcakes with RPIs of 150 or worse. And yes, I'm including Pitt on that list.