The Jacksonville Jaguars come to Pittsburgh this weekend with a 5-2 record, tied for the second-best in the conference behind the Kansas City Chiefs. Winners of four in a row, they are also coming off a mini bye, having played their last game on Thursday Night Football.
They should be well rested, but hopefully for head coach Doug Pederson, not too rested. Because he knows the environment the Jaguars will be stepping into when they travel to Pittsburgh. “We’ve got to get right back on it today in practice and just understanding the type of team we’re playing this week”, he said, via the team’s website. “They play hard, they play physical, if you’re not ready for this one, it’s going to be a long day up in Pittsburgh”.
Pederson noted that the Steelers have beaten some pretty good teams so far this year, though that largely pertains to in-division play. Of their four victories, only two have come over teams who currently have a winning record: the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Ravens.
Nevertheless, the point stands that the Steelers tend to bring a level of physicality that not every team faces on a weekly basis. It waxes and wanes, and sometimes is limited to one side of the ball, but when they are playing at their best, they can lay claim to being the most physical team in football, I would argue.
And, you know, they finally got that padded practice under their belts a few weeks ago, so that really fixed everything. But to Tomlin’s credit, he has done a better job than most in maintaining an identity rooted in physicality in a landscape within the NFL perpetually moving in the opposite direction.
“He does a great job of just getting his teams prepared, the way he messages his team, motivates his team”, Pederson said of his counterpart. “They play hard, they play physical, they’re fast, it’s a disciplined group. They always have been and it’s just the tradition of the Pittsburgh Steelers over time through history. He’s definitely carried that on in his career there as the head coach”.
Of course, the Steelers are coming off of arguably one of their least disciplined outings in a while, at least in terms of avoidable penalties. They drew multiple taunting penalties in the game even though, according to Tomlin himself, they had already been warned early on. But they did enter Sunday’s game as one of the least-penalized teams in the league.
And no matter how they got here, the reality is that they are still 4-2, and they have plenty of winnable games coming up. The Jaguars could possibly be their toughest non-division game remaining. After Sunday are the Tennessee Titans and the Green Bay Packers, both 2-4, and later on the one-win Cardinals and a New England Patriots team that shockingly doesn’t look as good without Tom Brady.
Already 2-0 within the AFC North, if they can manage to hold their own against their own rivals, the rest of the season is there for the taking. All you need to do is score one more point than the other guy.
