The first half of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars earlier today featured a decent amount of rough play from quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, and that was especially the case when he was looking in Antonio Brown’s direction. But by the time all was said and done, it was just another day in the office for the dynamic duo.
By the time the block read 0:00—and boy did they need just about all of it—the Steelers got in most of their usual statistics, including Brown, who finished the game with five receptions for a season-high 117 yards and yet another touchdown. The bulk of the heavy lifting came on just one spark, a 78-yard score on a scramble drill 13 minutes into the second half.
With that score, it gave Brown 11 on the season, which stands as the third-most in a single season for his career, and tied for the sixth-most in team history (behind two of his own seasons, of course, including his team-record 13 receiving touchdowns in 2014).
While he is on-pace to break his own franchise record in receiving touchdowns for a single season, Brown also took another step forward in tying the team’s franchise record for the most consecutive games within a single season with a score.
This was the eighth game in a row in which Brown came up with points in the end zone for Pittsburgh, something that he has done in nine of their 10 games so far. He tied Buddy Dial, who in 1959 finished the season with at least one receiving touchdown in each of the Steelers’ final eight games.
But he also scored at least one touchdown in each of the team’s first three games of the 1960 season, so Brown will have to keep scoring for another three games in order to tie the Steelers’ all-time record for the most consecutive regular season games played with an offensive score, that mark standing at 11.
One other player also scored in eight consecutive games, that being Tom Tracy, who also did it in the same years of Dial’s streak, between 1959 and 1960. He scored on the ground four times and through the air six more. He even threw a touchdown to boot.
Brown is not putting up the eye-popping receptions and yardage totals that he and his followers are accustomed to. He has ‘just’ 62 receptions for 807 yards to date with six games to play, putting him on pace for…99 receptions. 99.2 to be exact, so he is right on the line of falling off the 100-catch pace. He is still on pace for 1291 yards, which is more than he had in 2016, but otherwise his fewest since 2012.
But all that can be set aside with what he is doing in the end zone, as he is on course for a 17-18 touchdown season, which would shatter even is own personal best. There have only been 13 individual 17-receiving-touchdown seasons in NFL history, and five of them belong to either Jerry Rice or Randy Moss. Only four players have caught 18 touchdown passes in a season.
