The Steelers’ win against the Bills on Sunday has caused a lot of otherwise-intelligent people to go off the rails and lose perspective.
It was a nice win over a team we think is going to be in the hunt for the Super Bowl, on the road in front of a hostile crowd, with six rookies in the lineup, and they had to walk 10 miles to school uphill both ways, and ...
Enough, please. It wasn’t a playoff game. It wasn’t even a game to get into the playoffs. It was Week 1 of the NFL season, which is now 17 games long. It was a great win for the Steelers and they did some things really well, but could we come back from fantasy land and gain some perspective?
Did we not learn anything from all of the Super Bowl talk after 11-0 last season? This was one game, there are 16 left, and a lot of things will happen between now and the start of the playoffs.
This game reminded me of a lot of the wins the Steelers had in those first 11 games last year, in that they were a lot more resourceful — and dare I say a little lucky — than actually good. They won the game and that’s all that matters, but nothing I saw Sunday changes my thoughts about what the Steelers are: a playoff team with a few fatal flaws.
Let’s start here, though, and that is with the legitimate strengths of the team.
The front seven is elite and clearly going to be dominant the entire season if they stay healthy. Cam Heyward was a man among boys. T.J. Watt is not human. Tyson Alualu treated the guys trying to block him like wet dishrags and flopped them around. Melvin Ingram may be the best value of all the new players the Steelers signed.
That unit is going to be a problem for every team. They are fast, they are aggressive, they are tough-minded guys and they play with a little bit of a chip. They will get after quarterbacks and make some running backs consider retirement.
The same can be said about the Steelers’ receivers, who may be collectively the best group in the league right now. The receiving trio of Diontae Johnson, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Chase Claypool has a chance to be dynamic and made some big time plays and catches.
Those two things are where the over-the-top platitudes need to stop, however. And we knew they would both be elite, so it isn’t a surprise.
The rest of what I saw is a little bit concerning.
Start with the offensive line and running game. The Steelers hired a new offensive coordinator to rebuild the run game. They drafted a running back with their first pick. They rebuilt their offensive line. It was going to be their biggest improvement and that would help the offense.
And they still can’t run the ball. And worse — way worse — they quickly stopped trying to run the ball when it was clear it wasn’t working. Claypool had a jet sweep for 25 yards and Roethlisberger had 5 rushing yards. You take that out of the equation, and the Steelers ran for 45 yards — all by Harris — and one of those runs was 18 yards. Harris averaged 2.8 yards per carry.
Obviously it is only one game, but in order to improve the run game, you have to stick with it. And yet, by the second half Roethlisberger had already scrapped the Matt Canada offense and was back to the RPO stuff we saw last year.
And when it is an RPO involving Roethlisberger, it is actually more like a PO — the run option is never called. I set the over/under for when Roethlisberger would scrap the Canada offense and go to his version of RPO’s at three games — he didn’t even make more than 1/2 of one game.
And the offensive line made a few key blocks in the second half but for the most part did not perform well. Chuks Okorafor was not good and rookies Dan Moore and Kendrick Green both struggled.
It looked way too much like the same dink-and-dunk and can’t-run-the-ball offense we saw last year. It is too reliant on Roethlisberger making something out of nothing.
The secondary also is being hailed as heroicm but they should have gotten beat for at least three big plays. Two of those plays would have been walk-in touchdowns, but Bills quarterback Josh Allen missed.
(As an aside, I think Allen is very overrated and, at $200 million-plus, very overpaid. He just isn’t accurate enough to be elite, and that’s good for the Steelers because those plays were wide open and many quarterbacks wouldn’t have missed them.)
To be clear, it was a great win for the Steelers, who showed grit, toughness and a willingness to battle through adversity. Wonderful. Give them credit for that, but don’t lose perspective. They took advantage of a lot of Bills mistakes and won a game, but they still are a long way from a team capable of winning the Super Bowl.
Paul Zeise: pzeise@post-gazette.com or Twitter: @paulzeise
First Published: September 13, 2021, 5:48 p.m.
