Patrick Graham was standing at a podium in a windowless room on Pittsburgh’s South Side early Friday afternoon when he found himself reminiscing to times a quarter century into his past.
Recalling his social circle from his undergrad days at Yale, Graham rattled off where some of his best college friends are today.
One is a judge of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County in California. Another, a high-ranking executive in New York City. One made the smooth transition from practicing law to working in computer technology.
“I mean, truly smart people,” Graham said. “Witty people. Sharp people — who were tough on me.”
Graham never got into high-level law or politics or business. But to this day he draws from his experiences with those who have in applying it to a gig some in Pittsburgh might say is far more important and higher profile.
Defensive coordinator of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“What I got from Yale (is) not necessarily the Yale brand,” Graham said in his first public comments since head coach Mike McCarthy hired him in late January. “It’s the people I met there that came from different circumstances.”
These days, Graham isn’t interacting on a daily basis in person with those in high finance or on the bench weighing influential court cases. But he is everyday commanding a group of some of this era’s most impactful NFL defensive players such as T.J. Watt, Cam Heyward, Jalen Ramsey and more.
Given an autonomy to play his trade like few other coordinators around the league — the result of McCarthy’s hands-on approach to offense — Graham is in the early stages of providing a vision for how he wants the Steelers’ 3-4 defense deployed going forward.
Reminded he’s next in the lineage of defensive football minds who’ve guided the Steelers after the likes of Dom Capers, Mike Tomlin, Dick Lebeau and Teryl Asutin, Graham said he’s “not quite at that level in any way, shape or form.’ But that doesn’t mean he’s not striving to get the Steelers’ current big-name (and expensive) defense playing up to its potential.
New Steelers DC on what types of players are needed to fit into his scheme and how it melds with how the Steelers have built rosters pic.twitter.com/nfU8kAg5Ss
— Chris Adamski (@C_AdamskiTrib) April 17, 2026
“I’m just trying to find a way to earn my way in this tradition,” the 47-year-old Graham said Friday from the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex. “I don’t have to come up with any gimmicks here at Pittsburgh. There doesn’t have to be any slogans. It’s the Steel Curtain. I told the players when I first met with them — we’re trying to earn our position in that tradition in 2026, and that’s why I’m so excited to be here.”
Echoing what McCarthy has repeatedly said, Graham has no plans to reinvent the proverbial wheel when it comes to the Steelers’ scheme that dates back more than three decades to when Capers worked under former coach Bill Cowher.
Graham likes the current defensive roster composition for reasons as varied as its versatile “chess pieces” in the secondary, the size of the defensive tackles and the unique abilities of the edge rushers and inside linebackers.
And while Graham has seven previous NFL seasons of experience as a coordinator for three different teams under five head coaches, he cautions against looking too far into his past in projecting how he will guide these Steelers to play in 2026.
“It’s unfair, in my opinion, not to play to the roster,” Graham said. “That’s why you hear in any press conference I’ve ever done, there’s no ‘Pat Graham playbook.’ The playbook evolves once I get around the guys.
“So, we had these first two weeks (of the offseason program). I’m meeting (the players). We’re building it up. We know what the roster configuration is going to be like, a 3-4 roster configuration. There’s going to be sprinkles of that, sprinkles of four (defensive linemen). But the playbook evolves based on me getting to know the players. I have my principles. I have the things that I want to do. But to truly get a grasp of the scheme, it evolves as we go along, figuring out these players and what they do best.”