Pittsburgh Steelers guard Ramon Foster missed two games earlier in the season, but he has been back for two weeks now, and has been playing well as the offensive line starts to come together. He had his best game of the season on Sunday against the Cleveland Browns.
Not only was he seemingly flawless in pass protection, including seamlessly picking up stunts, his run blocking was also frequently impressive. While he isn’t the most agile lineman the Steelers have to offer, he is the type of player that is difficult to escape from once he gets his hands on you.
Nose tackle Ishmaa’ily Kitchen was among the first to learn this early on the Steelers’ second possession. On second and two, Maurkice Pouncey gave the nose tackle a push toward Foster before peeling out to the second level.
That bought Foster time to get over to Kitchen’s base, after which he began to turn him. With the linebacker going around the right end, Pouncey came back in to help seal off the nose tackle, and the two helped open a hole for four yards and a first down.
On the next play, with the Browns in their nickel, Foster managed to wedge right end Desmond Bryant inside, allowing Le’Veon Bell to follow through behind him.
To open the second quarter, Foster drove John Hughes out of the hole on the left side for LeGarrette Blount on a five-yard gain. The play as a whole was well-blocked, and if Blount could have gotten by the safety, he may have had daylight ahead of him.
With the Steelers in the two-minute offense at the end of the first half, the Browns tried to stunt linebacker Barkevious Mingo around the right defensive end, but Foster and Kelvin Beachum picked it up flawlessly. It gave Ben Roethlisberger plenty of time to fire incomplete to Markus Wheaton once again.
Early in the second half, Foster was working against Bryant once again. He showed impressive strength to not only win the inside leverage, but to get him perpendicular and completely seal off the end. It was a simple matter for Bell to run right off the big left guard’s back side.
The one blip on Foster’s stat sheet on the afternoon came late in the third quarter with he and Pouncey working on Hughes. The end made a great play to read Roethlisberger and get his arm up. He managed to deflect the pass, which was intercepted off the ground for the Steelers’ only turnover of the game.
