The Pittsburgh Steelers haven’t won a game in a while, so it’s been some time since I’ve gotten the opportunity to write one of these about a game in which they won. In fact, this was a win over the New England Patriots, in which they never trailed. They only played their first three drives under a tie score. I just wanted to point that out before we get started, though it is worth noting that they never played from behind, which could affect decision-making.
- Personnel groupings:
- 00: 17/64 (26/6%)
- 01: 1/64 (1.6%)
- 11: 39/64 (60.9%)
- 12: 2/64 (3.1%)
- 22: 3/64 (4.7%)
- V-32: 2/64 (3.1%)
- Do you think they might have had a pretty good idea in mind about what they wanted to do on offense? Outside of the victory formation, the Steelers only spent five out of 62 total offensive snaps with fewer than three wide receivers on the field at any given time.
- That’s just 7.8 percent of the time, meaning that they spent about 92 percent of their time on the field trying to move the ball while employing at least three wide receivers—and given going all the way up to the maximum allotment of five. 17 times. After using it for one snap in about the past seven years.
- The Steelers are still finding ways to keep Xavier Grimble He was on the field for all five of their snaps with multiple tight ends, but he was also used as the lone tight end on several occasions, totaling nine snaps outside of the victory formation.
- Obviously Antonio Brown and JuJu Smith-Schuster were featured on all of the team’s 11 personnel snaps, but the other three wide receivers minus Darrius Heyward-Bey all got burn as well. James Washington saw the lion’s share of those snaps, much of which came in the second half.
- Of the 45 snaps on which the Steelers employed a traditional running back, Jaylen Samuels was on the field for 45 of those snaps. And he lined up as a wide receiver for 10 of those snaps, moving all over, both inside and outside and on both sides of the field.
- I sometimes don’t know why the Steelers even bother using play-action at this point. Literally one play-action snap on Sunday, and it was the 24-yard completion to Brown.
- The Patriots blitzed a decent amount, on 13 of 38 dropbacks so just over a third of the time. Five of those blitzes came on third down and produced three stops, including a sack. The other two were the narrow-miss passes in the end zone to Vance McDonald and JuJu Smith-Schuster that were almost touchdowns. They did get two sacks and an interception on blitzes.
- Average depth of target: 11.7 (36 targets)
- Vance McDonald: 9 (3 targets)
- Antonio Brown: 15.9 (8 targets)
- Jesse James: 2 (1 target)
- Jaylen Samuels: 11.5 (2 targets)
- JuJu Smith–Schuster: 13.3 (10 targets)
- Eli Rogers: 7 (5 targets)
- James Washington: 18.8 (4 targets)
- Ryan Switzer: -2.5 (2 targets)
