The Pittsburgh Steelers have won every game played after their bye week for the past seven years. They are 13-4 overall in such games during head coach Mike Tomlin’s tenure. Sunday’s win over the Los Angeles Rams proved to be no different, the Steelers scoring a relatively rare West Coast victory and doing so in comeback fashion.
CB Patrick Peterson gave Tomlin the credit for that, chalking it up to “just the way Coach attacks bye weeks, having an opportunity not only to get ahead but reevaluating ourselves, seeing how we can get better”, as he said on his All Things Covered podcast with Bryant McFadden.
“For Coach, I guess the proof is in the pudding. It’s almost like a cheat code”, he added. “He just does a great job of making sure that we’re in the best possible position, that we’re paying attention to the division of labor, things that they like to do on a down-in and down-out basis”.
I don’t know about a cheat code, but the bottom line is that the Steelers did enough to win. And that wasn’t all part of the grand orchestration of two weeks’ preparation. Tomlin himself acknowledged yesterday that the Rams threw some things at them early on they had not anticipated that they had to adjust to.
But that is every game ever played. No amount of preparation is going to anticipate every possible eventuality you will encounter when experiencing the real thing. After all, there is a coach on the other side, one who knows what he does and what other teams will see on tape. You always bring something you haven’t shown before.
But preparation is also part of the process of being able to adjust when you need to. If this isn’t working, try this. That’s what the Steelers did in adapting to the Rams’ counter of their strategy to neutralize DL Aaron Donald, setting up schemes to get other players free to make plays. It’s no doubt part of the fun for Tomlin.
“Coach is just a football junkie”, Peterson said of Tomlin, of whom he is around in a coach-player relationship for the first time this season but whom he’s known for many years. “He just loves football so much, and just having a week to not play football and to just watch your opponent just gives us that extra edge”.
Notably, one of the things the Steelers worked on during the bye was actually implementing planned changes in Peterson’s role. It marked the real transition to his playing a much bigger role as what he described as a Joker role, moving throughout the secondary, able to play virtually any position on the back end.
That opened the door for more playing time for rookie CB Joey Porter Jr., whom the team is leaving on the outside and on the left. He played a career high in snaps, more than 50 percent of the total, and that should continue to expand.
