Pittsburgh Steelers third-string quarterback Landry Jones had a Sunday that he will never forget as the former fourth-round draft pick had quite a showing against the Arizona Cardinals when asked to relieve injured starter Mike Vick in the third quarter.
After the game, Jones reflected a little bit on his performance in the game.
“Oh my goodness, yes, it’s been a long road since those days at Oklahoma, but just so thankful. Just blessed to get in there and finally play the game again,” said Jones, who completed 8-of-12 passes for 168 yards and two touchdowns against the Cardinals.
After the game, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin praised Jones’ preparation leading up to the game and the quarterback was asked to detail what his week was like in practice.
“I’m just trying to prepare like the starters and in practice I don’t get a whole lot of reps. I mean, Mike got most of the reps and he’s going to go in and play and you just got to get in the back and go through it mentally,” he said.
So, does Jones feel like he proved a lot of his critics wrong with his Sunday performance?
“I don’t know, he said I mean I just went out there and I played how I was capable of playing,” Jones said. “We’ll look at the tape, but I missed some throws and made some throws and there’s always room for improvement. But like I said before, just so happy and blessed and I want to give God the glory right now, because without him, I don’t know where I’d be right now pushing through those couple of years where I didn’t get to play.”
We’ll look at several of the key throws that Jones made against the Cardinals in a future post, but I think it’s obvious that several of them are ones that we’ve never seen him make during his three years of preseason action.
You have to like Jones’ calm demeanor after the game as well and especially when it would be easy for him to point fingers and say, “I told you so.”
It remains to be seen if injured starter Ben Roethlisberger will be healthy enough to play next week against the Kansas City Chiefs, but if he’s not, it’s hard to imagine that Jones won’t be allowed to make his first career start.
