Not long ago, the Steelers’ opening drives felt pointless — they may as well have just punted on the first play to get it over with. But under OC Arthur Smith, those first few plays are suddenly worth watching, and they’re producing in a big way. Just look at the first play of the game against the Cleveland Browns with a 36-yard completion to Darnell Washington.
Ben Roethlisberger was a big fan of how Smith drew that up.
“Great scheme, great play call, Arthur Smith. Awesome,” Roethlisberger said via his Footbahlin podcast on YouTube. “Great play design early on. Bring Mount Washington in, he’s like 11-foot-3, he’s gonna block, come right into the line, and he inserts, and then everyone sucks down on the play fake, and he’s just out the back door. Awesome play design.”
If there’s one thing the Browns can do well, it’s play defense. Arthur Smith made a statement early by taking a shot and scheming up an explosive play to eventually get the Steelers their first points of the game.
It was a perfect stepping stone from his Week 4 game plan. The Browns likely practiced against the jumbo package all week and were ready to sell out to stop the run in those situations. Nobody expected the 6-7 tight end with three catches all season to slip out like that, which is why it worked so perfectly paired with Rodgers’ excellent play fake.
“It won’t work every time, that play probably won’t work again as an opener,” Roethlisberger said. “But you might be able to do something sneaky on it where he comes in and does the same thing. Instead of going deep, he goes out to the flat or cuts across the field there. There’s other ways now you [can] build off that play. But what they’re doing is they’re building off the run game.”
Now we see why it’s so important that the Steelers establish a viable run game. The analytics community will tell you that a good run game isn’t necessary to operate play-action well, but it absolutely set this particular play up.
They ran 13 plays with Spencer Anderson as a tackle-eligible with four passes for 40 yards and nine runs for 38 yards (including a 10-yard penalty). They aren’t passing much, but it’s proving very effective when they do out of these looks. It’ll be exciting to see how they continue to evolve the jumbo package to keep defenses guessing.
This was well-coached, well-schemed, and well-executed by everybody involved. Ultimately, it set the tone for the Steelers’ beatdown of the Browns. This won’t be the last big play we see from a similar look.
