Raise your hand if you were one of those clairvoyants wandering around the Labor Day picnic telling people that Pitt’s football season would last longer than the Steelers’.
I thought not.
Yet here we are with the Panthers, 51-6 losers to Penn State on Sept. 8, ready to kick it off in the prestige-free Sun Bowl on Monday afternoon while the Steelers, 7-2-1 the morning of Nov. 19, are doing forensics on a crime scene so gruesome they were reduced to kneeling in the Heinz Field grass rooting for the Browns on New Year’s Eve Eve.
“It just makes me mad that as a leader of this crew, we put ourselves in this situation lookin’ for others to do our job,” said defensive end Cam Heyward in a locker room where words came in short bursts from hushed voices. “Cleveland played a heck of a game. I didn’t get to watch any, but it seems like they did. It’s frustrating as a leader of this group. It’s unacceptable.”
The Steelers’ last entry in their 2018 journal was a 16-13 victory over some strangers who used to be the Cincinnati Bengals, which they accomplished without anything near the aplomb of a team that could last more than three hours in the NFL postseason anyway.
Mike Tomlin found himself having to thank emergency kicker Matt McCrane “coming in [and] getting on a moving train.” Crane scored 10 points in Pittsburgh’s narrow victory but probably would have appreciated knowing in advance that the moving train was headed toward a cliff.
During the head coach’s last post-game press conference (of the season, you maniacs, not his last ever), I had a strange flashback to one of his more poetic sentences of the season, coming as it did five days before the club dropped a come-from-ahead home game to the Los Angeles Chargers that accelerated a collapse that brought four losses in six games, two of them to Denver and Oakland, who combined to go 10-22 in 2018.
Tomlin was explaining the need to be able to both run and pass on offense, “if you want to be a team that stays on the road as it narrows.”
The Steelers didn’t want it apparently. They generated one 100-yard rushing performance in the final eight games, that one by third-stringer Jaylen Samuels. In that game, they vanquished the torturous Patriots, and in the five other games in which they had a 100-plus rusher, they were 4-0-1.
The fact is that Ben Roethlisberger, for all of his numerical brilliance, can no longer carry this team. His interception Sunday, returned for a touchdown by Bengals safety Shawn Williams, was his 16th of the season. He’s had only one season that was worse in that regard. He’ll be 37 in March. When he threw 40 times or more this season, they went 4-5-1. When he threw less, they were 5-1. He was without the injured Antonio “Trade me and let’s find out” Brown for the season finale, but it shouldn’t be lost on anybody that Roethlisberger’s teammates again snubbed him in the team MVP vote earlier in the week.
You’re never in a viable playoff position when you’re counting on the Browns for anything, much less for a win against division-leading Baltimore, much less on the road, where Cleveland has won two of the last, I think, 98. The fact that Cleveland nearly pulled it off shouldn’t put Sunday’s Steelers performance in any more favorable light.
The first possession was a fairly good indicator of their general demeanor, as Roethlisberger led them a sputtering 32 yards on 10 plays including a busted reverse to Eli Rogers, a false start by tight end Vance McDonald, a delay of game flag and a holding penalty on long snapper Kameron Canaday on the first of five punts.
The offense did not score a touchdown until late in the third quarter, scored none thereafter, and had it not been for the train-jumping kicker, would have been beaten by the team with the worst defense in the league. A defense, you probably noticed, operating without Vontaze Burfict.
Put another way, the Steelers, at their presumed highest level of desperation, were nearly beaten by Jeff Driskel, a quarterback who would throw for all of 95 yards and would not complete one pass of more than 15.
Pittsburgh’s defense, missing starters Vince Williams and Sean Davis, stepped out of its culprit’s role for one day, but it was that defense that hemorrhaged fourth-quarter TDs against Los Angeles, Oakland and New Orleans that did most of the digging the ditch that was 2018.
“It’s frustrating, we know we’re one of the better teams in the league,” said nickel back Mike Hilton. “We can always get better, every year to try to improve the team. We really have to make some changes on defense so that we can finish games.”
What needs to happen toward that end is obviously rife for speculation, but as that tiresome saying goes, when it’s all said and done, more will be said than done.
“Usually we don’t make a lot of big changes,” said guard David DeCastro.
That’s true. Maybe too true.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com
First Published: December 31, 2018, 2:31 p.m.
