TJ Watt calls Defensive Player of the Year award ‘secondary’ to team goals, says ‘not

With the 2021 Pittsburgh Steelers season now over, there isn’t much left to look forward to as a fan. the Pro Bowl is already determined, but maybe someone can be included as a backup. The All-Pro roster is now available, and that’s fixed. Maybe Najee Harris gets an outside shot at Offensive Rookie of the Year.

The only thing fans are probably really interested in between now and the start of free agency is administering the Defensive Player of the Year Award, for which, for the third year in a row, running back TJ Watt is a leading candidate.

The fifth-year veteran posted 22.5 sacks during the 2021 season, tying the NFL’s all-time single-season record. He also recorded five forced fumbles, 21 tackles for loss, 39 quarterback hits and seven passes defensed, all in 15 games. He added another sack and recovered a fumble for his first NFL touchdown, in the postseason.

With that kind of resume, he’s better positioned than ever to win Defensive Player of the Year after finishing second last year behind Aaron Donald and third the year before when Stephon Gilmore won. So how important is it to him to finally get his first trophy?

“It’s secondary,” he told Dan Patrick today. “I mean, it’s a good award to receive, I hate that it’s an individual award, just because there’s so much involved, including the individual sack record. So much has to happen. A fair amount of that has to be just quarterbacks taking coverage sacks with guys in the back calling the shots for me. So many things have to fall into place for things like that to happen. It’s definitely a nice prize to receive, but it’s not a safe individual reward.”

Technically speaking, any individual award is secondary to winning a Super Bowl, and if it ever came down to one or the other, I’m sure Watt would trade any number of DPOY trophies for the equivalent number of Lombardi trophies.

But that’s not how it works, and you know how important winning this award is to him, even if, the closer he gets to winning it, he refuses to acknowledge it. At least he has spoken in the past about how important it is. Unless you’ve decided over the past year that it’s not as important as you once felt, your response to Patrick seems pretty tame compared to what your true feelings must be.

While there are certainly other worthy contenders for the award this year, I think Watt is and should be the clear favorite, and it would be a much bigger surprise than in any of the last two years if he couldn’t win. If he does, it will be the eighth time out of seven players that a Steelers defender has won the award, by far the most for any team in NFL history.