After rushing for more than 200 yards and beating them in the regular season, the Jacksonville Jaguars return to Heinz Field for a postseason game against the favored and division-champion Steelers. They do so with a defense that sacked and intercepted Ben Roethlisberger, a larcenous secondary with a shutdown, big-play cornerback, a running back who tortured them in the first meeting and a quarterback who could make more big plays with his feet rather than his arm.
Strange as it may seem, this was the curious and parallel narrative 10 years ago when the 2007 Jaguars came to Pittsburgh and beat the Steelers twice in a four-week span, the latter ending the Steelers’ season. And this is what the 2017 Jaguars will be trying to accomplish Sunday in an AFC divisional round playoff game – coming back to Heinz Field and trying to beat the Steelers again with basically the same type of team, just different names and numbers.
“It’s the same way now,” said former Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew, one of the main antagonists in those back-to-back upset victories against the Steelers. “Both teams are very physical. Pittsburgh’s offense is kind of at the forefront of their team where Jacksonville’s defense is the forefront of their team. They’re built the same now as it was then.”
Only the characters have changed.
Instead of Fred Taylor, who ran for 147 of Jacksonville’s 224 yards in the Dec. 16, 2007, regular-season meeting at Heinz Field, the focal point of their running attack is rookie Leonard Fournette, who had 181 of the Jaguars’ 231 rushing yards in a 30-9 victory Oct. 8.
Instead of cornerback Rashean Mathis, who had two of the three interceptions against Roethlisberger, including a 63-yard scoring return, in a 31-29 playoff victory, it is Jalen Ramsey, the leader of a lockdown secondary that has four players with at least four interceptions.
Instead of massive defensive linemen John Henderson and Marcus Stroud who helped sack Roethlisberger six times in the Jan. 5, 2008, defeat, it is Calais Campbell and Malik Johnson who lead a defensive line that registered nearly 80 percent of the Jaguars’ 55 sacks.
And instead of quarterback David Garrard, whose 32-yard run on fourth-and-2 set up the winning field goal with 37 seconds remaining that ended Mike Tomlin’s first season as head coach, it is Blake Bortles, who rushed for more yards (88) than he passed (87) last week in what was the Jaguars’ first playoff victory since that day at Heinz Field 10 years ago.
The similarities are strikingly uncanny.
Click here for more Post-Gazette coverage of the Steelers’ playoff run
“We know the Steelers want to run the ball,” said Jones-Drew, who played eight of his nine NFL seasons with the Jaguars. “That’s how it was back then – they wanted to run the ball and they had Santonio Holmes. They’re built the same. They both want to play stout defense and take over games. One difference the Steelers have is Big Ben, where on the other side Blake is still figuring it out.”
To this day, the Jaguars remain the only non-division team to ever beat the Steelers twice at home in the same season. Can history repeat itself?
Well, the Steelers are hoping to repeat what they did last season when they lost to the Miami Dolphins and running back Jay Ajayi in the regular season and then hammered them at home in a wild-card playoff game at Heinz Field, 30-12.
“It’s going to be tough task for Jacksonville to come up there again,” Jones-Drew said on the phone last week. “But they’ve won up there before, so they’re very confident they can go in and play well and win ugly.”
Looking back
There was nothing ugly about the way the Jaguars beat the Steelers twice in that four-week span at Heinz Field.
In Week 15, they even beat them at their own game, ignoring a snow-covered field and wind-chill of 22 degrees that would seemingly benefit the cold-weather Steelers to run for 224 yards – 147 by Taylor, 69 by Jones-Drew. After jumping out to a 22-7 lead, the Jaguars endured a furious second-half comeback by Roethlisberger, who tied the score at 22-22 with a 30-yard touchdown to Nate Washington. But with 1:57 remaining, Taylor broke off a 12-yard touchdown run to cap a 29-22 victory.
“We were just excited to go up there and fight for a chance to stay alive,” said Taylor, who was born and raised in Florida, played for the University of Florida and spent 11 of his 13 NFL seasons in Jacksonville. “The game plan was, the weather was going to be bad, so let’s make sure we’re downhill [runners]. We want to get downhill and try to punish that backside A-gap, which we felt was the weakness of their defense. We did a couple things to take advantage of moving Troy Polamalu around and it worked how we scripted it out.”
The Jaguars couldn’t really script what happened the next time the teams met in the wild-card round of the playoffs.
After trailing, 7-0, Jacksonville got a 96-yard kick return by Jones-Drew to set up a touchdown, then made it 14-7 on a 63-yard interception return for touchdown by Mathis. Two plays later, Mathis intercepted Roethlisberger again, and Garrard found Jones-Drew on a wheel route for a 43-yard catch-and-run touchdown to make it 21-7. The Steelers had a chance at the end of the half to stop the bleeding, but Roethlisberger was intercepted a third time at the Jaguars’ 25 with less than a minute remaining.
After a Jeff Reed field goal made it 21-10 in the third quarter, the Jaguars came right back to take a 28-10 lead on Jones-Drew’s 10-yard touchdown run. But after his horrid first half, Roethlisberger rallied the Steelers with three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, eventually taking a 29-28 lead on Najeh Davenport’s 1-yard run with 6:28 remaining.
Then came the critical moment. On fourth-and-2 from the Steelers’ 43 with 1:56 remaining, Garrard took the center snap in the shotgun and, after a brief pause, took off on a 32-yard run to the Steelers’ 11, running past safety Tyrone Carter on the way. The Steelers were incensed, not only because they thought left tackle Khalif Barnes held outside linebacker James Harrison, creating the gap through which Garrard ran; they believed center Brad Meester tackled nose tackle Casey Hampton to the ground as he penetrated to the right side.
That set up Josh Scobee for the winning 25-yard field goal with 37 seconds remaining. The Steelers had one final chance, but defensive end Bobby McCray sacked Roethlisberger for a sixth time on first down, forcing a fumble that the Jaguars recovered.
“How did we get it done? We made enough plays to get it done,” Taylor said. “We had a lot of tough, no-name guys making plays, but they made names for themselves. McCray sacking Big Ben, Rashean getting an interception return, Maurice returning the kick back, David with the big play there. There were a lot of things that just happened for us. If we would have played them again, they probably would have beat us. They were a solid team, but we won when we needed to.”
Defense ‘carries’
Former Jaguars left tackle Tony Boselli, a five-time Pro Bowl selection and one of 15 finalists for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2018, did not play in those games in 2007 because he had retired five years earlier because of injuries. But he watched the regular-season game on television and was at Heinz Field for the wild-card playoff victory.
Boselli, now an analyst on the Jaguars Radio Network, said Jacksonville’s offense was better in 2007 because of Taylor, the 17th leading rusher in NFL history (11,695); Jones-Drew, one of the top multi-purpose backs in the league; and Garrard, a one-time Pro Bowl quarterback who had a passer rating of 102.2 that season, third best behind Tom Brady and Roethlisberger. But he said this Jaguars defense is better than the one that intercepted Roethlisberger three times and sacked him six times in the playoff victory.
“This group is 100 percent based on the defense,” Boselli said the other day. “This defense is really good, emotionally and everything else, and carries this team. When they get good to average offense, they are really tough to beat. This team can beat anyone in the NFL. You can wake up and they win the whole dang thing, their defense is that good. Or they could have lost in the first round.
“Offensively, they are hot and cold. Some weeks they look like they have it figured out, Blake looks good in the pocket. And other days, like Buffalo, it’s, let’s just hope we can get one more point.”
But, for in a four-week span of the 2007 season, the Jaguars managed to do something that no other non-division team ever accomplished against the Steelers. A decade later, they will find out if history can repeat itself.
Gerry Dulac: gdulac@post-gazette.com
First Published: January 12, 2018, 2:00 p.m.
Updated: January 12, 2018, 2:29 p.m.
