Right away in the Wild Card matchup against the Baltimore Ravens, it was clear that the Pittsburgh Steelers had made some schematic changes defensively in an effort to slow down Baltimore’s high-powered rushing attack.
One of those changes was crashing hard on the running back, whether it was Derrick Henry or Justice Hill, in the read-option game, which in turn would give Lamar Jackson a clean, wide-open edge if he wanted to pull the football.
It took a few plays, but once Jackson realized what the Steelers were doing with OLBs T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith, it was over for Pittsburgh. Jackson carved up the Steelers early with his legs and helped stake the Ravens to a 21-0 halftime lead with the Steelers so focused on Henry.
For team captain and standout defensive lineman Cameron Heyward, the Steelers tried to do some things differently defensively, but in the end instead of stopping one thing, they weren’t able to stop anything. And it just snowballed.
“There were some things that were different we hadn’t done, and you try to stop one and then the other goes off. Trying to stop all led to us not stopping anything,” Heyward said of the defense’s performance against the Ravens on his Not Just Football podcast, according to video via the show’s YouTube page. “Throughout it all, it just felt like we never really got a chance to take anything from the game.
“And then it kind of just opened up Pandora’s box for what could go wrong in that game.”
That’s an apt way to put it from Heyward, and it’s spot-on. The Steelers were so focused on trying to slow down Henry, especially after he rushed for 162 yards against them in Week 16, that they sold out in an effort to stop him, especially in the read-option game.
That was a dangerous gamble because in the end it allowed Jackson to get into a flow early in the game and took the wind out of the Steelers’ sails right away.
It took a bit for the Steelers to adjust back, too, and by the time they did they had no answers anywhere else. Henry ended up rushing for 186 yards and two touchdowns, including a backbreaking 44-yard touchdown in the third quarter to make it a 28-7 score just after the Steelers had seemingly climbed back into the playoff game.
Jackson added 81 rushing yards on 15 carries as the Ravens rolled to 299 rushing yards in the win over the Steelers, physically dominating them from start to finish. The Steelers tried to change it up, and in the end it burned them in a major way. That’s an indictment of the whole operation defensively, from changing up what was working from the coaching staff’s perspective to the players not executing on the field.
It opened up Pandora’s box, as Heyward stated, and then things snowballed on them in a hurry, leading to the blowout loss.
Check out the full episode of Not Just Football with Cam Heyward below.
