Pat Meyer vs. James Campen: Comparing Two Steelers Offensive Line Coaches By the Numbers
- Greg Simmons
- Jul 13
- 5 min read
When Pittsburgh hired James Campen to coach its offensive line in 2026, it closed a
loop that started four years earlier under very different circumstances. Campen is not
just replacing Pat Meyer in Pittsburgh. He replaced Meyer once before, in Carolina,
taking over the Panthers' offensive line job in 2022 the moment Meyer left it. That
overlap, two coaches handling the same chair at the same franchise in consecutive
years, creates an unusually clean opportunity to compare them using the same
measuring stick: the Pro Football Focus grades and team-level outcomes their offensive
linemen produced. The conclusion is not a simple verdict in either direction. It depends
heavily on which stretch of each coach's career is doing the comparing.
Pat Meyer's Career Arc
Meyer's most data-rich stretch is his four-year run as the Steelers' offensive line coach
from 2022 through 2025, and the trend line there is genuinely positive. Pittsburgh's
offensive line climbed PFF's team rankings steadily across that span, reaching the top
10 by 2024 and cracking the top 9 during the 2025 season after a Week 9 win over
Indianapolis. By the end of the 2025 season, his unit had individually developed two of
the better-graded players at their positions in the league: center Zach Frazier posted a
73.5 overall grade, eighth among 40 qualified centers, with a pass-blocking grade of
74.7 that ranked fifth, while right guard Mason McCormick finished with a 71.1 overall
grade, 21st among guards, after boosting his run-blocking mark by 15 points from the
year before. Pittsburgh also finished the 2025 season with the fewest quarterback
pressures allowed in the league, the lowest pressure rate allowed, third in pass-blocking
win rate, and the second-fewest false-start and holding penalties combined.
That said, evaluators were not uniformly glowing about Meyer's final season. One end-
of-year review specifically described his 2025 performance as underwhelming even
while crediting the unit's overall talent and depth for absorbing injuries without a major
drop-off. Going back further, Meyer's three years coaching the Los Angeles Chargers
(2017 through 2019) showed a similar pattern of internal development: the team's
rushing average rose from 3.8 yards per carry in 2017 to 4.7 in 2018, helping running
back Melvin Gordon earn Pro Bowl selections in both seasons, and Meyer is credited
with successfully integrating rookies Dan Feeney and Forrest Lamp into the lineup. His
2017 unit also allowed an NFL-low 17 sacks, the franchise's fewest since 1982.
Meyer's two years in Carolina (2020 and 2021) stand out as the weakest stretch of his
career by the numbers. The Panthers finished 29th in team pass-block win rate and
26th in run-block win rate in 2021, marks only marginally better than the offensive line
Pittsburgh fans had watched struggle that same season. Carolina's franchise history
rates Meyer as the third-least successful offensive line coach in team history by overall
win-loss record, at 10 wins and 23 losses across his tenure there.
James Campen's Career Arc
Campen's defining body of work is his 15 seasons with the Green Bay Packers, from
2004 through 2018, the large majority of which came under current Steelers head coach
Mike McCarthy. That stretch produced eight Pro Bowl offensive linemen, including
guard Josh Sitton, who earned four Pro Bowl nods in a five-year span, and tackle David
Bakhtiari, who reached first-team All-Pro in 2018. From 2010 through 2018, Green Bay
was the only team in the NFL with six different offensive linemen earning Pro Bowl
recognition, a continuity-driven track record built on long-term roster stability and a
single, consistent coaching voice.
After leaving Green Bay, Campen's results became far more dependent on the
organizations around him. His lone season in Cleveland in 2019 was a clear success:
running back Nick Chubb rushed for 1,494 yards, the most by a Browns back since Jim
Brown in 1965, and guard Joel Bitonio earned his second consecutive Pro Bowl
selection. His 2020 season with the Chargers was respectable as well, helping a unit
that started 10 different offensive linemen still finish ninth in total offense while
protecting Justin Herbert during his Offensive Rookie of the Year campaign.
His two seasons in Carolina, the exact job Meyer had just vacated, were the low point of
his career by team record. The Panthers went 9-25 across Campen's two years there,
the second-least successful offensive line coaching tenure in franchise history, narrowly
worse than Meyer's own mark in the same building two years earlier. The individual
grades back up the difficulty of that stretch. Carolina's guard position was specifically
described as a mess in 2023, with Brady Christensen playing just one game, Austin
Corbett appearing in only four, and the eventual best-performing backup, Cade Mays,
grading out at a modest 58.3. The team's offensive line did improve in PFF's broader
team rankings during Campen's tenure, climbing from 24th to 16th between 2022 and
2023, driven in large part by right tackle Taylor Moton, who allowed just 21 pressures in
17 games and graded as one of the league's better pass-protecting tackles in both
seasons.
Head-to-Head at Offensive Line: The Carolina Overlap
The closest thing to an apples-to-apples comparison is the two coaches' back-to-back
tenures in Carolina, since both inherited a similar talent base on the same roster within
a two-year window. By raw team record, Meye's 10-23 mark over two seasons narrowly
outperformed Campen's 9-25 over his two seasons. By team-level PFF offensive line
rankings, the Panthers were 29th overall in Meyer's final season (2021) and climbed to
16th by the end of Campen's tenure (2023), suggesting incremental improvement
continued under Campen even as the overall win total stayed poor. Individual grades
from both stretches cluster in a similar range. Five of six Panthers offensive line
regulars posted PFF grades between 61 and 69 in 2022, the first season after Meyer
departed and Campen's first season on the job, while the lone bright spot in 2023,
Moton's tackle play, was a continuation of strong individual play that began before either
coach's specific tenure. Neither coach's Carolina stint produced a unit that finished
better than middle of the pack, and both were working under multiple head coaching changes during their time there, which limits how cleanly either stint isolates coaching
quality from organizational instability.
What the Grades Can and Cannot Tell Us
It is worth being direct about what this kind of comparison can and cannot establish.
PFF grades measure how well a player executed on a given play, not how much of that
execution should be credited to coaching versus innate talent, scheme design from the
offensive coordinator, or the quality of teammates around them. Neither coach's
Carolina stint involved much roster continuity or coaching staff stability, which makes
those two seasons a weaker test of coaching skill than a stretch like Campen's 15 years
in Green Bay or Meyer's four years in Pittsburgh, where the same coach worked with
largely the same personnel under a consistent organizational structure.
With that caveat in place, the data points in a fairly clear direction. Campen's peak body
of work, built across a decade and a half of sustained continuity in Green Bay, is a
deeper and more decorated track record than anything in Meyer's career, including his
solid four-year stretch in Pittsburgh. But Meyer's tenure with the Steelers was trending
in the right direction at the time of his departure, and his Carolina tenure was modestly
better by team record than Campen's own time in that same chair. The likeliest
explanation for Pittsburgh's choice is not that the grades clearly favor one coach over
the other in isolation. It is that Campen's reunion with Mike McCarthy recreates the
exact organizational conditions, a stable scheme, a long-term head coaching
relationship, and roster continuity, that produced his best work the first time around,
conditions Meyer never had the benefit of during any of his five NFL stops.
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