In a single-elimination game after four-straight losses, Mike Tomlin is willing to turn over every stone in order to find a winning formula. After failing to see a single snap Saturday night against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tomlin said he’s open to deploying QB Justin Fields against the Baltimore Ravens during Saturday’s Wild Card Game.
“I’m certainly open to using Justin,” Tomlin said Monday via the team’s YouTube channel during his weekly presser. “He has an awesome skill set. We’ve done some of that in the past. We’ve done less of that in recent weeks. He suffered an injury a couple weeks back that slowed some of that. But certainly in an effort to win this game, I am open to any combination or combinations of the division of labor in an effort to do so. And so I’m certainly open to that as we develop plans this week.”
Fields logged just one offensive snap over Pittsburgh’s final five games. In context, he fully missed two of those with an abdominal injury suffered on his lone snap against the Philadelphia Eagles, hit hard after sliding on a designed quarterback run.
While the injury is one explanation for his absence, it doesn’t tell the entire story. After being replaced by Russell Wilson in Week 7, Fields only saw more than three snaps in one game, logging seven in a Thursday night upset loss to the Cleveland Browns.
Despite Pittsburgh’s offense limping to the finish line, Tomlin hasn’t shown an appetite for using Justin Fields as a spark. Speaking to reporters immediately after the Steelers’ Week 18 loss, Tomlin said he wanted to lean on the core players instead of changing things up with Fields.
“Because our failures were collective, and I just think at this juncture the most prudent thing for us to do was to stick with those that were on the field and work through it.”
The Steelers haven’t worked through things in a month. The run game has become inefficient, the team has turned the ball over too much, taken too many sacks, and simply hasn’t put enough points on the scoreboard. There’s still a line to walk in using Fields and as we wrote about early this year, it’s more complex than some may think, but failing to get him involved this weekend at all given their circumstances would be considered coaching malpractice.
