BALTIMORE — JuJu Smith-Schuster pulled his full-length orange coat over his fluorescent yellow turtleneck, slung his reflective multi-colored hologram bag that matched his shoes over his shoulder and broke free toward the exit doors of the Steelers locker room.
He finally got open, but just as he achieved the kind of separation that had eluded him for most of 2019, a double team of club operatives turned him around and presented him to the media.
“They’re making me talk,” Smith-Schuster said over his shoulder to a teammate.
And so he talked, but without much insight on his performance in this final Steelers act of a misbegotten season — two catches for six yards on six targets.
“I think Diontae [Johnson] had a great year, as a rookie he came in, he did his thing and I thought James Washington stepped up in huge ways and the times that I was out there, I think we did good but there’s always room to improve,” Smith-Schuster said. “It was my first real experience with injuries and injuries to teammates. We’ve got to get back healthy with all the pieces we have.”
He said some other things, but those were no closer to correct or relevant either, including that thing about how it seemed like it rained harder when the Steelers had the ball. Honest to god.
The fact is, what happened to coach Mike Tomlin’s team in the gloomy, rain-soaked twilight of Charm City was exactly what should have happened — they were unceremoniously banned from the postseason for losing to a quorum of Baltimore Ravens backups who scored almost as many points (28) as the Steelers did in the season’s final three weeks (30).
For Pittsburgh to have slithered into the playoffs at the expense of a talented Tennessee Titans team with a full arsenal of January-worthy weaponry would have been a travesty.
By gruesome contrast to Tennessee, of the 36 offensive possessions that covered the Steelers’ season-ending three-game losing streak, 27 ended with either a punt, a turnover or a safety. They scored one touchdown in eight of their last nine games. Sunday’s performance, blessedly, included a season-low 20:33 of possession time, which I guess they figured was all anyone could stand.
“It’s all of us,” Tomlin said in response to a post-game question about pass protection, which is why he followed with “we’ve got to protect better.”
But note the very next thing he said.
“We’ve got to get open.”
So true, and the hard truth is that had Duck Hodges and Mason Rudolph gotten even a little more help from this team’s allegedly talented young receivers, they probably would be readying for a playoff game next weekend.
Luckily, maybe a nice postseason at home will instruct the wideouts on the distance between their play and something resembling championship caliber. Last year, Antonio Brown scored 15 touchdowns himself in 15 games before he took the last Sunday off, the first seismic shift beneath an offense that fully quaked with Ben Roethlisberger’s elbow injury nine months later.
This year, the three main receivers — Smith-Schuster, Johnson and James Washington — had 11 touchdowns combined.
“We weren’t connecting on those third downs that we need, not making those big splash plays,” said Johnson, who led the wideouts Sunday with four catches on seven targets, including the longest completion of the day, a modest 21 yards. “We just have to come back ready next year. I’m looking forward to Ben hopefully coming back healthy so it can get back to the way it use to be and whatnot.”
Whatnot? Meaning explosiveness?
“I didn’t expect to play as early as I did,” said Johnson, a third-round pick. “Opportunities come around, and I think I took advantage of it, made the best of it, and progressed each and every week.”
Really? Nobody progressed these past three weeks.
Washington seemed just as clueless on the topic.
“I feel like us just overcoming a lot of adversity, from training camp to now, I feel like we made strides,” said the second-year man out of Oklahoma State. “I don’t think that what happened to Ben slowed our development at all.”
Washington was thrown the ball three times Sunday, dropped two, caught none. I don’t see a lot of progress there.
To be sure, Hodges and Rudolph, the second and fourth-string passers, played some terrible football this season, but they also played winning football more often than a lot of people expected. Hodges was certainly worse, but he was also the first undrafted rookie quarterback (excluding the 1987 replacement players) to win three NFL starts in the Super Bowl Era (since 1966).
Had he had more help, he might have extended things, albeit things that would likely have ended in New England, perhaps before halftime.
“Yeah, it is tough,” quothe the Duck, “but at the same time, I really enjoyed the experience. Shoot, I am 23. If you asked a lot of people if I would be in this position, they would have said no way. I am blessed. I haven’t really had time to sit back and reflect, but I played with the Pittsburgh Steelers this year, one of the most historic franchises in the NFL, and it is so cool and amazing.”
I guess when you start 0-3 and lose the franchise quarterback before halftime in Week 2 and still run with the playoff dogs until the final Sunday, cool and amazing are among the allowable descriptors.
In the meantime, don’t be afraid to draft a wideout or three.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: December 30, 2019, 4:03 a.m.
