With a prudent overabundance of caution and a compelling gesture toward the importance of public safety, the Steelers Thursday night walloped the visiting Carolina Panthers so thoroughly by the middle of the third quarter that they allowed much of the crowd to exit and make it home well before Antonio Brown got into his car and out onto the roadways.
Brown, the gifted Steelers pass catcher with the, uh, active lifestyle, had been apprehended earlier in the day operating his Porsche at upwards of 100 miles per hour on McKnight Road, but he swung by Heinz Field Thursday night to pick up one of Pittsburgh’s seven touchdowns in a 52-21 victory.
Unlike Brown, stopped by Ross police in his latest misadventure, the Steelers could not be stopped by any enforcement body even remotely associated with the Carolina defense, which watched helplessly as Mike Tomlin’s team unleashed a typically incandescent prime time performance, scoring the first eight times it had the ball if you count the time linebacker Vince Williams returned a ridiculous Cam Newton pass from his own end zone 17 yards for a first-half touchdown.
The Steelers are 25-8 in prime-time games on the North Shore, 20-6 under Tomlin.
“That’s what is so exciting about joining this Steelers team, last year and this year, just the amount of experience and knowledge of how to approach things, unique things like ‘Thursday Night Football,’” said tight end Vance McDonald, whose exquisite leaping grab in the back of the end zone was part of a series of offensive explosions that blew a 24-14 lead into a 52-14 rout with just five seconds elapsed in the fourth quarter. “Packing in all the preparation on Tuesday and Wednesday, it is difficult, but I think we did a great job and I thought we had a great plan.
“I was on the sideline talking with [fellow tight ends] Jesse [James] and [Xavier Grimble], just thinkin’ like, ‘Man when was the last time I scored 52 points in a football game – junior year in high school!’ It’s one of those things you just have to sit back and realize it’s a great feeling. The way we started this football game was just unbelievable.”
They’d actually started it down 7-0, having allowed Carolina running back Christian McCaffrey to pile up 60 yards on six plays on the game’s first possession. The Panthers came in 6-2 amid all manner of glowing national buzz. In Pittsburgh, their only lead of the night would last exactly 11 seconds.
Ben Roethlisberger sent JuJu Smith-Schuster galloping past a confused Carolina secondary for a 75-yard strike on the Steelers’ first offensive play, a spectacular overture for a performance so balanced it would produce 52 points without the benefit of either a 100-yard rusher or a 100-yard receiver.
“This is not normal,” said center Maurkice Pouncey. “To score 50-some points is almost impossible. It’s awesome we got to experience it, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be like that again.”
Probably not, but there’s an intriguing indicator within Randy Fichtner’s unit that’s making this team downright fearsome right now, namely the solidification of its third-down persona, something Tomlin talked about at some length when September ended with a 26-14 loss to the Ravens on this same lawn and a 1-2-1 record.
The Steelers were 2-for-12 on third-down conversions against Baltimore Sept. 30 and just 6-for-22 in the two games prior to that. But the five games since have been a little different: 9-for-12, 8-for-14, 6-for-13, 10-for-16 (at Baltimore), and 8-for-11 last night. When Roethlisberger left in the fourth quarter and Tomlin sent Josh Dobbs out there with a mop, the Steelers were 8-for-9 on third down.
“Third downs are always a tough situation for linemen,” said Roethlisberger after another show-stopping nocturnal cadenza (passer rating a perfect 158.3). “For all of them to see different looks, different blitzes, whether it’s an exotic look or a disguise, it’s challenging, so I’ll give more credit to the linemen than the play-calling, but the play-calling was really good.”
Play-calling, both Roethlisberger’s and Fichtner’s, continued to be surgical in the red zone as well, where the Steelers went 4-for-4 and have now scored touchdowns 15 of their last 17 trips inside the opponent’s 20-yard line.
Thus it’s not terribly mysterious that these Steelers have won five in a row, but the fact that they’ve won by an average of nearly 17 points would indicate that this is a team improving fast, really fast.
Not as fast as Brown on McKnight Road, but really fast. I’m sure that whole thing was all a big misunderstanding. Maybe Brown spotted the guy who’d allegedly lifted $80,000 from his backpack in the Florida condo from which he allegedly threw all the furnishings from the 14th-story balcony.
He wasn’t robbing a bank, which is what authorities first suspected. A.B. was merely pursuing a robber. What a citizen! Big misunderstanding.
At 100 mph plus.
Not in the middle of the night.
In the middle of the day.
First Published: November 9, 2018, 11:03 a.m.
Updated: November 9, 2018, 11:03 a.m.
