Less than five minutes into the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin elected to punt the ball away facing a 4th-and-7 from the Eagles’ 46-yard line. The Steelers never saw the football again on offense and lost 27-13.
Per the Surrender Index, that punt was one of the most cowardly punts of the last 25 years. But as Alex Kozora wrote, do you expect an offense to grind out an 11-minute drive to close out a game? That’s an incredible feat.
But the Steelers defense was on the field for a 13-play touchdown drive their last time out. And the offense only held the ball for around four minutes of game clock. While Tomlin loves to rely on his defense, they were in a bad spot. And the Eagles were able to grind out a 10-plus minute drive to ice the game.
“There was a lot of decisions that were questionable,” said Sporting News columnist Mike DeCourcy on the #1 Cochran Sports Showdown after the Eagles game. “The decision to punt down two scores with a 4th-and-7 and put your defense back into that grind. And look what happened, they got ground more than they already had.”
In all, the Eagles carried the ball 42 times for 131 yards and a touchdown. So the Eagles were not consistently gaining big yards on the ground, but they remained committed to the run game and it wore down the Steelers defense.
Tomlin had to know that the Eagles were going to do everything they could to grind out as much time as possible. That would limit the number of possessions and time the Steelers had to score. Which means that every yard and every play was valuable.
“You need to convert there just to have the opportunity to get two scores,” DeCourcy said. “You couldn’t be guaranteed even with a reasonable defensive performance that you were going to get two possessions again in that game that would be worthwhile. So they had to go for it… I still believe it was a huge mistake.”
On the Eagles’ first two possessions of the second half, they held the ball for at least six minutes. So it would be reasonable to presume the Eagles could grind out another six-plus minute drive at some point. The clock and the scoreboard were certainly against Mike Tomlin and the Steelers.
But was it a clear decision to go for it? Obviously, the analytics think so. However, the Steelers were facing a 4th-and-7 and they had only gained 163 yards of total offense to that point. Tomlin gave more reasoning during his Monday press conference, saying that the distance was just a little too long for him to feel good about going for it.
We know that Tomlin loves to put his defense up against any team in the league. So he figured that if the punt pinned the Eagles deep, it would give the Steelers a shot to get the ball back and a fresh set of downs relatively quickly.
Punter Corliss Waterman and the special teams unit did their job. WR Ben Skowronek downed the ball inside the 10-yard line (and an Eagles penalty backed them up to the three). But the defense still could not get off the field.
The Steelers fell to 10-3 with the Baltimore Ravens looming this weekend. No doubt there were a lot of things that went into a two-score loss on Sunday, but Mike Tomlin’s decision to punt there will certainly stand out when everyone looks back at the game.
