The Pittsburgh Steelers spent a lot of time in the early 2010s working on the read-option, but not on offense as they had Ben Roethlisberger in his prime and he wasn’t exactly that type of quarterback. They spent time figuring out the best way to approach the play as a defense tasked with shutting it down. The play took the league by storm with the emergence of Robert Griffin III, Russell Wilson, Colin Kaepernick, and others and many teams started to try to emulate their success and implement their own versions of the play.
Defensive coordinator Dick Lebeau called it “just one more gun that we gotta be able to silence” in an interview at the time.