Although Kaleb Johnson had a major gaffe on a kick return on Sunday, it’s far from the Steelers’ first under Mike Tomlin. Specifically recalling incidents in which they failed to field a kick, this is the third time it has happened in the past decade. Although the other two incidents occurred on free kicks following safeties, the same concept applies.
In 2017, against the Kansas City Chiefs, the Steelers had a major gaffe off a free kick, with Antonio Brown and JuJu Smith-Schuster failing to properly communicate with each other about who would field the ball. Ultimately, neither did, and the Chiefs recovered.
A year later, the Steelers committed a similar gaffe on another free kick. In this case, Roosevelt Nix signaled for a fair catch—which you can’t do on a free kick—and Ryan Switzer stopped pursuing the ball. Switzer later admitted that he did not know the rules, in that a kickoff, whether a free kick or otherwise, is a live ball once it travels 10 yards. Although now, on a kickoff, a ball is live when it enters the landing zone, inside the 20-yard line. Alex Kozora handily compiled them for me, which you can see below:
A free kick is not exactly the same as a kickoff, especially now with the dynamic kickoff, but it’s still a gaffe to fail to field the ball, as Johnson did for the Steelers on Sunday. After the game, he declined to provide a clear answer regarding his knowledge of the rule in that situation.
For his part, when asked after the game, Tomlin said they work on such scenarios every day of their lives. Yet Tomlin’s special teams unit under Danny Smith has committed a major gaffe off of kicks at least three times over the past 10 seasons, and that’s hard to justify.
Understand, it’s one thing entirely for a player to muff the ball while trying to field a kick or punt. Those things happen to every team every year, and it’s also common for a ball to hit off a player during a punt without him even realizing it. But to just give up on a live ball, or lack the situational awareness in a live-ball situation, is a major problem.
Now, there isn’t a lot we can connect between the Steelers’ kick return gaffes of 2017 and 2018 versus today. But Mike Tomlin and Danny Smith are still here, that much we know. I imagine there isn’t a single player on those units remaining, so the personnel is entirely different. And rookies are going to make mistakes, Johnson making a colossal one here. Chances are, he’ll never make it again, even if given 1,000 chances. Lessons learned the hard way are equally hard to forget.
This isn’t to say that this is some recurring pattern or that everybody needs to be fired. And to be clear, there is a big gap between the prior incidents and the current incident. Still, it’s remarkable for any team to have two of these gaffes within a decade, and the Steelers have three. That’s not even mentioning Gunner Olszewski’s brain-fart toe-tap incident, which was a gaffe of a different nature.
They won all of those games, by the way, so maybe Kaleb Johnson is cursed.
