Vontaze Burfict is an idiot.
For all else that's been so miserable about Marvin Lewis' miscreant Bengals for so long, he still somehow finds a way to sink below the lowest of sub-human standards.
You know, like kicking a guy with both feet ...
That's Burfict going at Roosevelt Nix. Right in the skillet. After the whistle. Second snap from scrimmage, first mental snap for the idiot.
Minutes before that, Burfict refused to shake hands at the coin toss, holding them behind his back like a bratty child.
And three hours later, Burfict again refused to shake hands at game's end, simply sprinting toward the visitors' tunnel at Heinz Field alongside injured fellow idiot Pacman Jones.
Winners will win, and losers will ... gently give back your lunch money and beg forgiveness?
"He was kind of quiet all game, to be honest with you," David DeCastro would tell me later regarding Burfict. You'll recall those two collided like bighorn sheep last December in Cincinnati. "He just came to play football."
Say what?
"No, really, he did."
But what about the kick?
"Ah, that was nothing. I'm telling you, he really wasn't a problem. None of them were. It was just a good football game, for once, and he wasn't really any different."
After a slight shake of the head, DeCastro added, "It was kind of weird, actually."
Ha!
Well, here's what wasn't weird: The Steelers pounded this particular opponent. They punched the Bengals in the mouth, then in the gut, then pretty much wherever they pleased.
And here's what isn't weird, at least not to me because I wrote much the same from Kansas City a week ago: This is a really good football team. The best team in the AFC.
Anyone care to debate that?
OK, but it's best to come armed with a copy of the NFL standings.
The Steelers are 5-2, tied for best in the conference with the Chiefs, who they just creamed in a strikingly similar manner. They're also comfortably atop the AFC North, with the second-place Ravens now well back at 3-4, the Bengals 2-4 and the Browns being the Browns. And within the division itself, the Steelers have now won all three games.
Fuss all anyone wants about Chicago and Jacksonville, but the current status and the continuing improvement count a whole lot more than any regrets.
"This is a football team that keeps getting better," Ryan Shazier told me, and then without hesitation added, "and we aren't where we want to be yet."
"We aren't there yet," Bud Dupree would say.
"We aren't there yet," Darrius Heyward-Bey would say.
There were probably a couple of those I picked up around the room, so the sentiment felt universal. And it's plenty justified, in both interpretations, because the Steelers' offense finally broke out as had long been anticipated, and the defense ... well, that breakout took place a few weeks back, but it's now beginning to cement into something that's bona fide special.
On offense, Ben Roethlisberger looked crisp and confident in his passing, far beyond what a 14-of-24, 224-yard line might suggest. It could be seen all over his smiling face afterward, too, when he beamed, "Yeah, it was great. We felt really good throwing the ball." Le'Veon Bell, who'd fairly echo that in saying "I feel great about where our running game is now," stiff-armed his way to another 134 yards on 35 carries. Antonio Brown and JuJu Smith-Schuster caught touchdown passes from a safely spread-out attack.
And on defense, after a so-so first half in the face of a visibly determined Andy Dalton, the Steelers responded by limiting the Bengals' offense to a single first down, by sacking Dalton four times and by wholly erasing A.J. Green (zero catches) and rookie back Joe Mixon (zero carries) from existence.
"A lot of that was just communication," Shazier would offer. "We came in here, made sure we were all on the same page, then went out there and executed. When we're communicating, we don't think there's anyone we can't stop."
That's rooted somewhere, if you ask me, and it's not on the surface and, with all due respect to Shazier, it's not signal-calling or other schematics.
No, it's about all that punching.
It's about Nix being the ultimate old-school fullback, mowing down a path for Bell all game long, then answering questions afterward as if he were minding a library:
"What that guy does for us," Roethlisberger would say, "really goes underappreciated."
Nix isn't alone on the offense. DeCastro served up more pancakes than Pamela's in the Strip. Maurkice Pouncey nullified all-world nose tackle Geno Atkins. Chris Hubbard, subbing at right tackle for Marcus Gilbert, was beaten a couple times by edge man Carlos Dunlap, but Alejandro Villanueva told me, "Chris should get all the credit. We left him alone over there. We trusted him to do a hard job, and he did it."
Oh, and about Bell's stiff-arm on poor Dre Kirkpatrick ...
My goodness. Talk about old-school.
This offense, beginning at Arrowhead Stadium and carrying right through this, has carved an identity that, while it might not be the one we all expected, is the one that works. Roethlisberger completed only 14 passes, but he might have been at his most efficient in managing the game, if only because the game is now to go right through the other team. By being nasty.
I asked Ben about quarterbacking behind that:
That's it. That's it exactly. These Steelers, even on the side of the ball that's supposed to endure aggressiveness rather than perpetuating it, are built on personalities that genuinely enjoy the stuff.
"Across the board," Pouncey said.
"You can't fake that sort of thing," DeCastro said. "We have people who love to hit people, who love to play that way."
Mike Tomlin's going to take all the usual heat in all the usual forums, and he'll have richly earned it for that bungled clock management at the end of the half, a bizarre sequence in which he ran the ball with eight seconds remaining and cost the offense possibly two additional cracks at the end zone. And I'll repeat for emphasis: That's fair criticism.
But what won't get mentioned, I'll bet, is that Tomlin deserves the most credit for creating this offensive mindset basically in midstream. No one thought Martavis Bryant would be a non-factor, and a whiny, bratty one at that. No one thought we'd still be waiting on a secondary receiver at almost the halfway point of the season. And, for sure, no one thought Ben would have the downfield issues he's had. But Tomlin and, by extension, Todd Haley have quietly gone bigger and bigger in their offensive sets -- two tight ends are standard, Nix is being used more than ever, etc. -- and they're running like it's 1977, not 2017.
When asked about Bell and the running game, Tomlin's reply pointed squarely to the field.
"He's rolling well," Tomlin said of Bell. "But when he does, it's the product of a lot of things. The guys up front, obviously. I thought the wideout perimeter blocking was excellent today. It's an 11-man job to run the football for us."
It's also the man at the top setting that standard.
And you'd better believe that standard applies to the other side of the ball:
I could run enough of those to clog the cybersphere. It was that kind of day, and it's been that kind of season.
"We're here to hit you," Mike Mitchell said. "That's what we do."
"We have those people who enjoy that," Vince Williams said. "That starts with all your offseason work, Latrobe, the preseason, and then you finally get to go out and do it in games. In AFC North games like this. That's not something you can simulate. So when you get that chance, to go out there and do it for real, to play football the way we like to play it, that's something you've got to embrace. And we do."
I asked Dupree about that:
After Bud's sack, in one of the season's most striking sights at Heinz Field, he raced to the 20-yard line of the north end zone, raised his arms triumphantly and visibly soaked in the standing, roaring crowd, one that only minutes earlier had been chanting 'Dee-fense! Dee-fense!'
You know, old-school.
"Oh, what a rush that was," Bud would tell me. "You heard those fans. That's Pittsburgh, man. That's Pittsburgh. That's the Steelers Nation there. It's like it was one big thing, you know?"
[caption id="attachment_460842" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
Vontaze Burfict runs off the field after the game without shaking any hands. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS[/caption]
Burfict knows. Long before his latest loss in this storyline, he'd emerged from the tunnel at that same end of the stadium, parting briefly with the rest of his team so that he could shout to a handful of Steelers fans hanging over the surrounding railings, "Y'all gonna hate me today!"
This before disappearing in action, with nothing to show but a couple solo tackles, a couple assists and a cheap, cheesy kick at an honest football player who didn't flinch and just kept fighting.
Why didn't Nix respond in the moment?
Undoubtedly it's the same reason he didn't respond when asked about it afterward.
"You know, it's something we talked about," Nix said of preparing for Burfict. "You don't want to do something to put your team in a bad place. He did what he did. He's a competitor. He didn't really say anything after that. I didn't, either. You just move on."
Most of the Steelers were like DeCastro in downplaying the incident, but not Bell. He spoke about it at length in his interview session with reporters, saying, "My fullback got kicked in the face. That's just not football to me. I don't think that's a respectable play. For me, I just like to play respectable football. Whether you play tough or whatever it is, within the play, it is all fine. After the play, unnecessary things, trying to hurt people, I don't like that."
He went a good bit further later in the night on Twitter:
man dude gotta go man...that’s not football AT ALL!! https://t.co/IFbNZPZtWR
— Le'Veon Bell (@L_Bell26) October 23, 2017
it’s unbelievable the league is just condoning this activity...but if Rosie reacts, Rosie would be the one that would get into trouble https://t.co/IFbNZPZtWR
— Le'Veon Bell (@L_Bell26) October 23, 2017
Remember Burfict wrecking the various seasons of Roethlisberger, Brown and Bell with malicious intent?
Remember how it was feared he'd keep doing that again and again, since neither the NFL nor the Bengals seemed interested in doing anything about it?
Remember how the bully always gets bitten back in every after-school movie you've ever seen?
Well, let's just say this bully wasn't available for comment in the Cincinnati room. Apparently, he wasn't done running from a team that's a hell of a lot tougher than he'll ever be.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
[caption id="attachment_460840" align="aligncenter" width="1000"]
Steelers vs. Bengals, Heinz Field, Oct. 22, 2017. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS[/caption]
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