Thursday Night Football was anything but good for the Pittsburgh Steelers. After beating the Baltimore Ravens, they had plenty of momentum, but it didn’t seem like they could do anything right against the Cleveland Browns. The Steelers eventually made it a closer game, but they came out of the gate slow as molasses. Mike Tomlin pointed to that as one of the biggest reasons his team lost.
“They made more plays over the course of 60 minutes than we did,” Tomlin said after the game via the team’s YouTube channel. “Obviously we gotta own our portions of it, particularly early on. I thought it took us too long to warm up to the action.
“We were penalized, some pre-snap penalties. It just wasn’t really sharp. We got going, our guys fought, but it wasn’t enough to secure victory and so, it’s painful, but its life in this business.”
Tomlin is correct that the Steelers had a terrible start to this game. On their first drive, they seemed to have something going, but Russell Wilson took a bad sack. That forced the Steelers to attempt a 58-yard field goal in bad weather, with Chris Boswell notching his second miss of the season. Things did not get better from there.
On the following drive, the Steelers decided to leave their offense on the field for a fourth-and-short. It wasn’t a terrible decision, but the play call and subsequent execution were brutal. With Justin Fields in the game, everyone knew what the play was going to be, and the Browns stuffed the Steelers.
They did eventually put a field goal on the board, but that was about all the Steelers did until halfway through the third quarter. They just never seemed to be in a rhythm, both on offense and defense. They clawed their way back into the game, but it was too little, too late.
That’s been the story with the Steelers for most of the year, though. Since Wilson took over as the starting quarterback, they’ve only scored three touchdowns in the first half. That’s just not good enough. They’re still in a good place at 8-3, but the Steelers need to stop coming out flat to open games.
Luckily, they have a decent break ahead to try to remedy that problem. Things feel bad at the moment, but they can get back on track. The Steelers are still a top team in the AFC. They just need to get out of their own way.
