The Pittsburgh Steelers suffered a bevy of injuries in their embarrassing 24-10 loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday, one of which was to LB Elandon Roberts. The Steelers’ inside linebacker room has been decimated by injuries, and with Roberts, the team’s defensive signal caller, suffering a groin injury in the first quarter, the team’s communication was lacking, according to head coach Mike Tomlin.
“I thought we struggled from a communication standpoint when Elandon Roberts went down. We lost some significant communication and some glue there, and I thought it was reflective in our play,” Tomlin said in his postgame press conference via the team’s YouTube channel.
With Roberts down, LB Mykal Walker, who’s only been on the active roster for three games, wore the green dot and called the team’s plays. The Steelers had a lot of issues when it came to getting stops on third downs, with Arizona converting five times on third down on its 99-yard drive. That included a 19-yard run by RB Michael Carter, a 21-yard completion to TE Elijah Higgins and a 17-yard completion to TE Trey McBride. It was an ugly performance, but Pittsburgh’s inability to perform on weighty downs and poor defensive communication was a serious issue.
We’ll see if Roberts will be able to get back on the field for Thursday Night’s matchup with the New England Patriots but given that it’s a short week, that could be tough. If he isn’t able to play, the defense collectively is going to need to figure out a way to improve their communication so they don’t allow so many big plays on weighty downs and so they can get stops and get off the field.
This Steelers felt like they were trending in the right direction after their Week 12 win over the Cincinnati Bengals, but today’s game took away a lot of progress. Losing to a 2-10 Cardinals team at home is inexcusable, and they just got outplayed. It’s not going to help when the communication is as poor as it was defensively, and the Cardinals were able to convert 10 total third downs and win pretty handily over the Steelers.
The team struggled with communication in Week 10 after Kwon Alexander went down, but Roberts was able to step up and take on the main communication role. Now, it’s going to be up to Mykal Walker or Blake Martinez to step up and figure out how to handle being in charge of the defense and communicating. If they can’t do that, the Steelers are going to continue to have issues.
