I’m just going to move forward with the presumption that the majority of our readers know and understand that a couple of the main writers at this site are heavy metal fans, myself being one of them. I note that at the beginning of this piece to provide context for why the way that Mike Tomlin began his press conference yesterday caught my ear.
To paraphrase, he opened by saying that winning is our business, and business isn’t good. That couldn’t be any more obvious as a statement of fact, considering that they have played three games and have lost all of them, but it unintentionally invoked Megadeth’s debut album, Killing Is Our Business…and Business Is Good!.
The Pittsburgh Steelers are doing anything but making a killing right now. Though their last two losses have come late and in close games, getting close to a win doesn’t give you partial credit, so as they currently stand, they are vying for the opportunity to give the Miami Dolphins the first-overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft…since they traded that pick away.
“We recognize that football is our game”, he said. “Our business is winning, and so we haven’t been handling business. And so we’re talking a look at ourselves and taking a look at what transpired in the game”.
His primary focus was over the turnovers. The Steelers were able to record five takeaways, and yet produced just six points from them, two field goals on drives that began in field goal range. They even gave up a turnover after having recorded one, offensively.
“We got some significant turnovers at the early portions of the game. We put our offense on the short field, and we settled for field goals”, Tomlin told reporters. “Usually, there are consequences of not supporting yourself in that way to really kind of maximize the positive, and so although we were in control of the game, we were not in control of the game in the ways that we could’ve been had we punched some of those opportunities in”.
Conversely, he noted that the opposite side of the ball failed to “minimize negativity”, as the defense allowed the San Francisco 49ers to score touchdowns on both of the drives that began following a giveaway by the Steelers’ offense.
It’s one thing not to maximize the potential positive gains of recording a takeaway, but it’s another to fail to minimize the potential negativity of a giveaway. When you fail to do both, you tend to get what happened on Sunday. And that’s bad for business.
