"The Steelers kicked the Steelers' asses."
They didn't, really. The Heinz Field scoreboard froze for the final time late Sunday night at 31-28 in their favor over the Packers, courtesy of Chris Boswell's 53-yarder wobbling through the golden uprights of the non-dreaded closed end with the clock at all zeroes:
See? The only thing being kicked, in the end, was the ball.
And yet, Mike Mitchell's aforementioned ... uh, assessment made perfect sense.
Because this matchup, pitting the AFC's top team against a .500 opponent missing its franchise quarterback, top two running backs and more, shouldn't have boiled down to any significant suspense, never mind 62,147 sets of crossed fingers, never mind the maddeningly necessary brilliance of Ben Roethlisberger, Antonio Brown and Le'Veon Bell.
The defense should have done its job. Meaning an awful lot better than this.
Green Bay backup Brett Hundley passed for one, two, three splash-play touchdowns of 55, 54 and 39 yards. And when tossing in a 25-yarder, those four passes alone accounted for 173 of his 245 total yards through the air. This is difficult to fathom but, on his other 26 passing plays, he was 13 of 22 for 77 yards with four sacks.
How could anyone defend that disparity, even if the secondary did tighten up in the second half?
We might never know the answer because, at least among those with whom I spoke, no one tried particularly hard to concoct one.
"We've just got to do our jobs," Artie Burns was telling me at his stall. "We don't need to change anything. We just need to eliminate the bad plays."
"I just feel like we gave them everything on that board," Sean Davis would chime in from the next stall. "I mean, they're a good team, and we're going to get everyone's best game. But we've got to do a better job."
So, it's just execution, then?
I put that to Coty Sensabaugh.
"We've just got to get better," he came back. "It's about making the play. Yeah, it's about execution. Not anything else. Just executing."
Well, OK. I know better than to argue with the actual participants. There's no doubt here they believe what they're saying or, if this is the case, being told. Besides, although Mitchell referenced using a little more man coverage than the norm, the schematics weren't altered and didn't appear to be a factor regardless. So execution probably was, in fact, the primary culprit.
Including upon closer inspection:
This was Hundley's 55-yarder to Randall Cobb, who was so open he'll now go broke paying his Allegheny County property taxes.
Mitchell tried to take blame for this, telling me, "I know everyone's going to talk about the corners, but I always feel like I'm responsible as that last player who has to make the tackle."
Nice sentiment, but no way. In the Steelers' Cover 3, Burns was the deep man responsible for the left sideline, and Mitchell was responsible for the deep middle. But Burns, apparently thinking he was on a man assignment rather than zone, lined up across from Jordy Nelson and followed Nelson, No. 87 up there, to the middle of the field on a post route. And there went Burns’ responsibility deep. Cobb took a stroll down the vacated left sideline while Burns and Mitchell tangled up.
It sure looked -- and sounded -- like a total lapse on Burns' part.
"Just execution, man," he fairly repeated when I asked about that play.
Above is Green Bay's next bomb. Also known as a routine screen pass.
The Steelers came with a five-man blitz, and Hundley dumps it off to Jamaal Williams, the Packers' third-string back. Ryan Shazier's part of the blitz until he sees the screen develop and backs off. But by the time he does, Green Bay center Corey Linsley seizes an ideal angle to flick him away. Davis badly overruns Williams by the sideline, and the rest is just a lot of bizarrely abandoned turf.
"It just can't happen," Davis said. "There's nothing really to say."
Except that a third-and-8 screen shouldn't show up on the highlights.
The third big touchdown, 55 yards to Davante Adams, looks much more like the bulk of the Steelers' mistakes of late: Receiver beats corner. Safety help is late. Tackles are missed. Dude keeps running.
Sensabaugh's in man coverage, and Adams beats him with a textbook double-move that Sensabaugh swears he saw coming.
"I absolutely knew he was doing a double-move," Sensabaugh told me. "But I slipped a little and, as he went by, I got bumped a little by his arm and couldn't catch up."
He almost caught up, as Adams was at least slowed slightly by Mitchell missing a tackle. And yes, Mitchell blamed himself for that one, too.
"I take pride in making tackles like that," Mitchell said. "I've made tackles like that here at a high level for a couple years. I've got to stop that play."
It's execution, as they insist, or lack thereof. And if it were isolated to this night, any 9-2 team could justify shrugging it off. It isn't, though: In Indianapolis three weeks ago, Jacoby Brissett, the Colts' backup, threw touchdown passes of 60 and 61 yards. Last week against the Titans, Marcus Mariota, who's having a setback season, threw a touchdown pass of 75 yards.
In the first eight games, the Steelers had allowed only one touchdown pass longer than 16 yards, that being an Alex Smith 57-yarder in Kansas City. Suddenly, it's six of 39-plus yards in three weeks.
And looking beyond scoring plays ...
Yikes.
I asked Mitchell about all of that:
The easy place to point is Joe Haden's absence. His fibula was fractured late in the first half of the game in Indianapolis, and all six touchdowns of 39-plus yards have followed that. But the fact is Matthew Stafford's precision passing in Detroit four weeks ago wrought five passes of 25-plus yards with Haden out there, so this just might have been mounting beforehand.
Put another way, no one's talking up being the NFL's No. 1 pass defense. If anything -- and hey, its certainly fair game to bring up the Patriots now that Mike Tomlin, of all people, stunningly did so in his NBC interview this weekend -- it's maybe the most powerful legitimate cause for concern in the coming showdown with New England.
Tomlin ruefully cited "the big plays of late" and added, "That has to stop yesterday."
To an extent, it at least slowed in the second half, though the Packers' tying drive late in the fourth quarter -- 12 plays, 77 yards -- served as an excruciating setback. Also, and much more pivotal, a heavier rush on Hundley resulted in two timely sacks on the same third-quarter series by L.T. Walton and Cam Heyward ...
... to bring about Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy's bizarre call to try a futile 57-yard field goal and shift the feel of the game.
Heyward, worth singling out every week anymore, continued to perform at an All-Pro level with two sacks, six tackles and three quarterback hits. And he, too, sounded bitterly displeased.
"It's self-inflicted," the big man said. "It's things we can control. I think we had a couple busted coverages. We gave up a screen. We have to be better."
That's right. It's got to get better. Better than "trash," which is what Vince Williams called it in our candid talk:
Next up, believe it or not, are the Bengals, not the Patriots. But we're getting close enough to the latter that a lot of lines are rightly blurred.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
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Steelers vs. Packers, Heinz Field, Nov. 26, 2017 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS[/caption]
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