Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson believes the Ravens gave away Sunday’s game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, a 17-10 loss that put Pittsburgh in first place in the AFC North.
That might be largely accurate as the Ravens turned the football over three times and had two more turnovers on downs. They dropped seven passes, too. They may have given the game away, but what they absolutely did do was let the Steelers hang around.
It’s not pretty, but that’s the style of football the Steelers want to play. Keep it close throughout, don’t beat yourselves, make enough plays at the end of the game, win.
That’s what Pittsburgh did on Sunday, and that’s what has former NFL defensive end and host of the Green Light Podcast Chris Long cautioning other teams moving forward about letting the Steelers hang around, using a hilarious analogy in the process.
“With the Steelers, if you have a party, they’re that guy that if you don’t get him out of the house by 10 o’clock, the mother[expletive] is sleeping on your couch. The Steelers are going to be sleeping on your couch if you leave them in the ballgame,” Long said, according to video via the latest episode of the Green Light Podcast. “They love these rock fights. This guy is the Floyd Mayweather of rock fights, Mike Tomlin.
“He’s undefeated [in rock fights]. So, the math math’d here. In this situation, they are a great team, they are a great rock-fight team.”
Long is spot-on with this assessment of the Steelers right now under Tomlin.
It’s no secret that the defense is the strength of the team. It should be with all the great players the group has on that side of the football, led by T.J. Watt and Minkah Fitzpatrick, not to mention Alex Highsmith. They are going to lean on their defense, keep games low-scoring and find a way to win late.
That’s what they did in the second half of the season last year, going 7-2 down the stretch, and that’s largely what they’ve done this season when they win. That was again the case on Sunday against the Ravens in another awesome AFC North battle.
But make no mistake about it: the Ravens let the Steelers hang around, and when you do that in the NFL, that is quite dangerous. Baltimore found that out the hard way, again.
Dropped passes, turnovers, unforced errors, they all did in the Ravens. They allowed the Steelers to hang around and Pittsburgh did what it does late in games: make some plays and find a way to win.
Is that sustainable? No, not really, but it’s a style of football that Mike Tomlin and the Steelers currently find quite comfortable. It works, too. They’re 3-2 entering the bye week and are in first place in the AFC North. They’re sleeping comfortably on the Ravens’ couch for the week, too.
