If you listened to my Sunday morning interview on Trib Live Radio, you heard me say that the Pittsburgh Steelers should have success running left in the game against the Cincinnati Bengals. I couldn’t have been more right.
According to our early game charting, Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell had 13 runs to the left side Sunday against the Bengals and those runs equated to 143 yards and two touchdowns.
In total, the Steelers had 17 runs to the left for 157 yards and the two scores.
So what about the power counter runs? Yes, those were things of beauty and if you’ve read and listened to me long enough, you know how much I love that play.
Sunday against the Bengals, guard David DeCastro pulled left 11 times and those runs resulted in 125 yards and two touchdowns. We’ll break several of these down later on Monday, but Bell and the Steelers offensive line knew the Bengals defense couldn’t stop it.
“We saw that they couldn’t stop it,” Bell said after the game. “The offensive line — that’s the play they wanted to go with. We ran a lot of counter, a lot of ‘Georgia.’ The offensive line was like, ‘Man, we feel good about it.’ As a runner, I’m running whatever the offensive linemen want to run. So those guys felt good about it. We ran the same play two, three, four times in a row, consecutively. Those guys just couldn’t stop it. So we continued to run with it. I tried to stay patient, made sure I held onto the ball and got what I could.”
