Chris Boswell didn’t like it. Danny Smith didn’t like it. And Mike Tomlin is avoiding him like Terry Bradshaw just asked him over for dinner. Boswell booted two kickoffs out of bounds, including the opening kick, giving the Baltimore Ravens the ball on the 40.
But Smith says no one was more upset about it than Boswell and he immediately came in Monday to figure things out.
“There’s nobody hurt more by it than Chris Boswell,” Smith told Bob Labriola on today’s Coordinator’s Corner. “Monday morning, Boz was in my office early Monday morning, shut the door and said let’s take a look at those kickoffs. When you’re coaching a guy like that, how important it is to him, what it means to him, and what it means to this city and his teammates, it’s special when a guy does that.”
And the mechanical flaw that caused his kicks to veer outside the white lines have been fixed, according to Smith, though he understandably didn’t specify what exactly those issues were.
“We found a little bit of a flaw in a certain kick. We corrected it on the video, he and I, we’ll carry it through and carry it out through practice.”
Smith said not only does it obviously hurt the defense from a field position standpoint but it deprives the coverage unit from doing their thing. And when the Steelers were asked to cover they did a nice job.
“We cover pretty good over the course of the game. Had a tackle inside the 20 and expected more. It gives an opportunity to do it. If you see the reaction of the coverage team, it upsets a lot of people because it’s how they get paid. That’s how they get their money, that’s their job, is in coverage. And we got a team that likes to cover.”
Though that didn’t stop Vince Williams for causing chaos on that opening kick, despite it flailing out of bounds.
Boswell will have this week against the Cleveland Browns to test out his new kicking style and hopefully right the ship for the playoff run.
