It goes without saying that the Pittsburgh Steelers defense suffered a huge blow in their Week 13 Monday night road game against the Cincinnati Bengals when starting inside linebacker Ryan Shazier was lost for the remainder of the season due to a serious injury to his spine. If that wasn’t a big enough blow, Shazier’s backup, Tyler Matakevich, was also effectively lost for the remainder of the season due to a shoulder injury that he suffered later in that same game.
While Matakevich only missed one game because of the injury, he was only able to play on special teams the remainder of the season and that ultimately resulted in the Steelers needing to sign inside linebacker Sean Spence back to the team and he wound up seeing the most time in the starting lineup and the defense suffered severely because of that.