Sunday, there was little positive to take away from a 30-6 loss. It was a black cloud of negativity. Mistakes on offense and defense crushed the Pittsburgh Steelers in one of their worst losses of the Mike Tomlin era, falling in miserable fashion to the Houston Texans.
Speaking to reporters after the game, Tomlin said negative plays continued to stack up against the Steelers, particularly on offense.
“We didn’t minimize enough negativity,” he told reporters postgame via the team’s website. “We didn’t stay on schedule enough. So drives get stalled or you settle for field goals and so was a perfect storm for us offensively and defensively from that perspective.”
It was a perfect storm that swallowed the Steelers. Their run game sputtered in the first half and the offense went nowhere, shut out in the initial 30 minutes for the first time since late in the 2021 season. Defensively, Houston ran with relative ease, especially early, with power running back Dameon Pierce consistently falling forward.
Ever since a Week One loss to San Francisco, Tomlin and the Steelers have made vocal their emphasis on eliminating negative plays on both sides of the ball. Their actions haven’t been nearly as loud. Coming into the week, Pittsburgh had a league-high 31 percent of runs (excluding kneel downs) result in zero or lost yardage. It’s not clear how the Steelers did today, they at least ran the ball better in the third quarter, but they had too many issues in the first half. On their five first-half possessions, they punted four times and threw an interception on the other.
Over their 10 possessions, they kicked a pair of field goals, punted the ball five times, threw a pick, turned the ball over on downs (getting QB Kenny Pickett hurt in the process), and their final drive was the team running out the clock to end the game.
Whatever progress the Steelers might have made in their Week Two and Three wins over the Cleveland Browns and Las Vegas Raiders were cancelled out by the steps taken backwards Sunday against the Texans.
Talk is cheap. Either get better – that’s players and coaches – or find people who can. Despite what looked like upgrades to their roster on paper, the Steelers find a way to go backwards as a team. Which is fitting for a team that did nothing but that on the field Sunday.
