Few football situations require avoiding the end zone intentionally, but Tee Higgins found one Sunday. His decision to stop short helped the Cincinnati Bengals close out their win over the Pittsburgh Steelers — something Ben Roethlisberger wishes Pat Freiermuth had considered just minutes earlier.
“I will say this, when he was getting ready to score as he was at like the 15-yard line, I was like, ‘Go down, go down, go down'” Roethlisberger said via his Footbahlin podcast. “Because you don’t wanna score too fast. Because the defense couldn’t stop the Bengals.”
Hindsight is always 20/20, but it’s fair to ask whether Freiermuth should’ve done what Roethlisberger suggested. Very few pushed back on (or even thought about) his long touchdown decision at the time. Choosing to go down would have almost certainly been met with pushback, especially if the Steelers ended up failing to reach the end zone a few plays later.
Here were the facts: Pittsburgh was trailing 30-24 and Cincinnati had two timeouts. Freiermuth crossed the goal line with 2:21 remaining in the game.
Assuming he went down around the 10-yard line, there would have been 2:22 remaining. Ideally he would have stopped with slightly more than 10 yards remaining so there was still a possible first down to pick up. Even if the Steelers scored two plays later, they would have either burned another timeout or two from the Bengals, or made it to the other side of the two-minute warning.
Whether or not this would have been enough to secure victory is debatable. It felt like the type of game where the team that had the ball in their hands at the end of the game would walk out the victor. It didn’t take Cincinnati long to march down the field, and they went well within the field goal range they needed to win.
And there is no guarantee the Steelers would have even scored a touchdown. Their red zone offense has been strong overall with a 72.2 touchdown percentage, but they already entered the red zone once earlier in the game, settling for a field goal.
I get the logic, but the correct decision in Higgins’ situation was much more clear-cut. Whether or not the Steelers’ defense was getting picked apart all game, it’s hardly too much to ask the highest-paid defense in the league to protect a lead with just over two minutes remaining. I personally don’t fault Pat Freiermuth at all.
Which side of the debate do you fall in?
