2018 NFL Week 5: Steelers Friday Night Five Questions

Happy Friday to yinz and welcome to another exciting weekend full of football.

It’s now October and the Pittsburgh Steelers enter the second quarter of the 2018 regular season with a 1-2-1 record. I’m not sure many would have predicted that back when training camp started, but here we are. The Steelers will be looking to avoid a third consecutive home loss Sunday afternoon at Heinz Field when they host the 1-3 Atlanta Falcons, a team that many predicted would make a deep playoff run this year. Both teams drastically need a win on Sunday.

I hope most of you caught my Ace Hardware fire pit story on Twitter. In short, wifey tried to order one fire pit but due to the old spinning-circle-issue on their website, she inadvertently ordered 5 of them and they all arrived on our front porch this past week at the same time. It was quite a scene and resulted in several curse words being said in our house. Luckily, the establishment made everything right and we were able to get all of our money back after delivering four of those pits back to a local store.

The weather is turning here in Las Vegas now after a small part of that storm that came out of the Pacific delivered as few hours of rain. It was 78 here today and not a cloud in the sky. This is one of the reasons I moved here as you get 9 months of perfect weather in exchange for 3 months of 110 degree weather.

Wifey and I will once again be providing Christmas for two challenged families in the Lav Vegas area this year and we would really like to make one of those a Steelers family as well. If you know of any families in the Las Vegas area that should be considered, please email me some preliminary details.

Moving on, as usual, I have five questions for yinz to answer in the comments ahead of Sundays Steelers game and I look forward to reading the responses. Special thanks to David once again for keeping up with the scoring.

Peace and love, peace and love and may yinz have a safe and prosperous weekend!

1 – Through four games the Steelers defense has allowed an average of 324.3 passing yards. Will the Falcons offense be under or over that average Sunday at Heinz Field?

2 – The Falcons defense will be without defensive tackle Grady Jarrett on Sunday against the Steelers and that could result in the Pittsburgh offense having a lot of success running the football between the tackles. Will Steelers running back James Conner exceed 80 yards rushing Sunday against the Falcons defense?

3 – True or false: Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown will score two touchdowns against the Falcons.

4 – How many of these five things will the Steelers accomplish Sunday at Heinz Field against the Falcons? (*a win, *score more than 29 total points, *score a defensive touchdown, *block a punt, *stay under 9 total accepted penalties against, *register over 449 total yards of offense)

5 – The current over/under for total points on Sunday between the Steelers and Falcons is 58, according to MyBookie.ag. Are you taking over or under that number?

Recap of 2018 NFL Week 4 Steelers Friday Night Questions

Question 1 – The Ravens beat the Steelers by 12 points. No chance of a score within 3.5 points since the Pittsburgh offense could not score in the 2nd half while Justin Tucker practiced chipping in field goals. 79.7% of Steelers Depot respondents picked up a point by saying the winner would score more than 3.5 points over the loser.

Question 2 – Matthew Thomas played 12 special team snaps but did not play a single defensive snap. Only 17.6% of respondents correctly answered that Thomas would play less than 5 defensive snaps. With the injury to Vince Williams this will likely change against Atlanta.

Question 3 – Only two completions came close to fitting the parameters of this question. Antonio Brown’s 26-yard touchdown and JuJu Smith-Schuster’s 38-yard completion late in the 1st quarter. Steelers Depot respondents were optimistic about this game being a shootout if not a Steelers victory. The pessimistic few, 16.2% to be precise, who said that Ben Roethlisberger would not complete more than two deep passes (ball travels more than 15 yards in air) outside the numbers got this correct.

Question 4 – The longest Steelers running play was a paltry 4 yards, so this answer was among the receivers. James Conner, who received 4.1% of the vote, had a 15-yard reception. Vance McDonald (4.1%) came close with a 33-yard reception. James Washington (13.5%) could only manage a long reception of 6 yards. Antonio Brown was the most popular choice with 48.6% but his 26-yard touchdown was his long reception. Leaving JuJu with 28.4% of the vote tally and his 38-yard reception as the winner. One wag had a long shot with Darrius Heyward-Bey as his choice. Unfortunately, D-Bey left early in the game but he did have 5 offensive snaps so who knows what would have happened if he could have played the whole game.

Question 5 – It sure seemed like a lot more, but Baltimore only accepted 5 Steelers penalties. Three on defense and two on the offense including the bogus call on Conner’s block. Significantly, there were no flags on Steelers special teams play. 43.2% of respondents were correct.

Usually the consensus answers of Steelers Depot respondents are correct more often than not. This week, a minority were correct on 4 of 5 of the questions. Not surprisingly, no one received the 5-point bonus for answering all 5 questions correctly. Three folks: Phil Brenneman II, Hoptown & IC in Cincy did get 4 out of 5. So, they are the high scorers of the week. Kudos.

Nine new entries on this week’s leaderboard. There are 20 other folks within 2 points of getting on it – lets see how you all do in week 5!

The Leaderboard after Week 4:

*new to leaderboard