The Pittsburgh Steelers are winners yet again, emerging victorious yesterday evening over the Los Angeles Rams. But it was far from a dominant performance, perhaps the fourth quarter being excepted. As with their other three wins over the first six games, it was a one-score margin, whereas they lost by three scores in their two defeats.
In other words, they don’t have a dominant game, even if they have had dominant moments. The Steelers might win more often than not, and that’s ultimately what matters. But opponents don’t come away from their games feeling deflated. Rather, they seem to tend to think they let the game slip away.
Rams WR Puka Nacua, for example, credited Pittsburgh but said that they “were able to come out there and play our game”, via the team’s website. “There was nothing that I felt like they restricted us from doing”.
“It just comes back to us being able to execute in those critical moments, some of those third downs where we weren’t able to extend the drive and putting our defense in bad situations”, he added. “Not complementary football”.
All of the Rams’ 17 points came within a four-series span from about the middle of the second quarter to the middle of the third. They did have a missed field goal a couple drives before that and another one after it.
Notably, outside of the one-play drive that ended in an interception, there was only one series throughout the game on nine other possessions in which the Rams were held without a first down. They had 19 in total for the game, more than Pittsburgh, who had seven on their go-ahead possession in the middle of the fourth.
It’s notable that they picked up 35-plus yards on half of their possessions, as well, in each case ending their drives either inside of Steelers territory or in the end zone. Interestingly, the Steelers also finished the game with half of their drives in Rams territory, though half of those came in the fourth quarter. And they had fewer than 10 net yards on half of their possessions as well.
As for Nacua, there is nobody who has greater reason to feel the way he does, given that he caught eight passes during the game on 12 targets for 154 yards. He has 58 receptions on the season in his first seven career games for 752 yards, the second-most in NFL history behind Ja’Marr Chase, who had 754 yards in his first seven games.
Los Angeles did run the ball well overall, averaging 4.4 yards per attempt on 31 runs for 135 yards. QB Matthew Stafford completed less than half of his pass attempts in spite of the fact that only two of them were batted or intercepted. The pressure game can be thanked for that, even if they had only two sacks and two quarterback hits as a team.
But when will we ever hear an opponent actually sound defeated again? When is the next double-digit win? They only had two all of last season. It would be nice to have a game that isn’t a coronary risk. But that’s a luxury. The win is what counts.
