Steelers Pay for Ugly Win
Image Courtesy of: Sam Greene USA Today Sports
No one would’ve thought that the Pittsburgh Steelers would walk into Cincinnati and steal a win from the defending AFC Champions. But they did and it came at a cost.
First off, the defensive played one of the most incredible games in a while. They sacked Joe Burrow seven times and intercepted him four times one of which resulted in a pick-six courtesy of Minkah Fitzpatrick. The defensive needed to have an excellent game if the Steelers were going to have any chance of winning. They arguably played better than excellent. Unfortunately, the defense did most of the heavy lifting as the offense didn’t do much of anything all game.
The offense had thirteen possessions (some thanks to turnovers) in which one of them resulted in a touchdown. And that drive was saved by a pass inference call. Mitch Trubisky played decently. He didn’t do anything to press on the field or statically, with the one pass to Pat Freiermuth on a trick play. He completed 21 of 38 passes for 194 yards and 1 touchdown. The offensive line did a mediocre job at best. While Trubisky wasn’t sacked, the line failed to create gaps for Najee Harris to run through. He carried the ball 10 times for a total of 23 yards. Which is unacceptable for any offensive line.
Chase Claypool was the leading rusher for the Steelers with six carries for 36 yards. All of those rushing yards were on jet sweeps since running the ball elsewhere was useless. And with an injury to Harris that could prevent him from playing, the Steelers are going to rely on the jet sweeps as their run game. Against Bill Belichick that will only work once if you’re lucky.
If the Steelers want a shot a New England again, the defense is going to be spectacular again, and will have to do it without T.J. Wyatt who suffered a pec injury late in the game. There is no doubt Belichick will show some defensive packages that will confuse Mitch and the offensive line. It will be a matter of how they will respond to those packages. They need to take shots down the field and up the matter. That was something that was few and far between against the Bengals in Week one.
Overall, not a bad performance for the Steelers considering the fact no one had them winning this game. However, the job just got a lot harder since there is no T.J. Wyatt (potentially for the rest of the season) and most likely no Najee for the next two weeks. But Mike Tomlin always finds the weirdest ways to win games. Sunday was no different.
