Stephon Tuitt wouldn't budge. He'd draped one towel around his torso, another over his head, and he stared straight ahead into his stall in Heinz Field's home locker room. As cameras and microphones migrated from one corner to the next, as his fellow Steelers either embraced or declined the chance to discuss the deflating, if not devastating, 27-24 loss to the Patriots that had just occurred on this Sunday night ... the big man just sat there.
Finally, I thought I'd approach one of the most approachable professional athletes one could ever encounter.
"Hey," I started. "You in there?"
The reply was barely audible. That whole towel thing.
I tried again.
"Yeah. Yeah, I am. This hurt. This sucked."
Yeah. Yeah, it did for all concerned. And if the depiction of one very large, very threatening defensive lineman being broken down like this, however temporarily, doesn't do the scene justice, trust me that it was all over. Artie Burns. Mike Hilton. David DeCastro. The team's brass. The team's coaches. The stadium workers.
The fans filing out of the place. My goodness, that was Walking Dead incarnate.
Jesse James acknowledged he wouldn't be able to sleep in what might have been his seventh wave of interviews, these spread around a brief heart-to-heart with fellow tight end Vance McDonald. The Glassport kid was left thinking about what did happen, what erased it and now just what could have been. Kind of like the rest of us.
James would be the last one out of the room, aside from the equipment managers and custodians. His expression at that stage looked nothing like it had maybe a half-hour earlier:
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Jesse James celebrates what was initially ruled a touchdown. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS[/caption]
I have another column on the site. It's about the wretched officiating that marred this game in many ways, as well as the miserable league that assigned one of its most notorious crews to its main event of the regular season, not to mention said league's constant mangling of what constitutes something so simple as the reception of a forward pass.
But I'll leave referee Tony Corrente and the NFL to that file. This game deserves a ton more consideration on a ton more levels, so here are a few things that have me, kind of like James, staying up late on this winter's night wondering about both the bad and good:
• The bad: They lost. Life's a little more complicated now.
The Steelers can still clinch a valuable first-round bye through victories against the Texans, who've been a catastrophe of late, and the Browns, who've been a catastrophe since the British Invasion. Not the musical one, the military one.
They can't say this or even think it, but those will be cake. They'll wind up 13-3.
The Patriots probably will, too, facing the Bills and the Jets, though Buffalo's at least annoyed some opponents this season. They'll also wind up 13-3.
That, of course, points to the dreaded return trip to Foxborough for the AFC Championship Game, provided both teams "do what they're supposed to do," to borrow Mike Tomlin's words from a couple weeks ago. And that setting, history tells us, doesn't bode any better for the Steelers than New England did for that original British Invasion.
"There's a road that we have to take," as Cam Heyward put it. "I know we both have the same record now. At the end of the day, we have a lot of football ahead of us. Now, we have to go on a four-game winning streak from here. I don't look at it as anything crazy. I mean, four games to the Super Bowl. We can't be dejected about this. I like where we're at."
• The good: What Cam said.
Imagine if the schedule were aligned so that, say, the Bengals and Ravens were next. The Steelers would have to beat themselves into oblivion just to get that bye, at which point they'd need it just to recuperate. As it is, if they're smart, efficient, and Tomlin wisely keeps his depth involved in dispatching two terrible teams, they'll be in optimal shape -- minus Ryan Shazier, of course -- entering their first playoff game.
• The bad: The defense came up small at the game's biggest stage, conceding a breezy five-play, 77-yard touchdown drive after Jordan Berry had just booted a 60-yard punt to help them out.
"It wasn't good," Javon Hargrave told me. "We needed to be better when it counted."
It was that much worse considering the Steelers' offense had kept Brady and company off the field in the first half for all but three drives. The Steelers' defense should have been fresh and fired up, especially considering who showed up to watch and wave a Towel:
• The good: Mike Hilton, a playmaker from the day he reported to Latrobe this past summer, was assigned an interesting hit-man type of role, including tracking much bigger tight ends down the field. He showed up huge, too, with four tackles and two passes defensed.
"We didn't win," Hilton told me, and that was about it.
Bud Dupree, finally cut loose to rush the passer rather than drop into coverage, hounded Brady all through the second half with a sack for a 7-yard loss, a quarterback hit and two tackles for losses, mostly in rapid succession.
"You always want to make plays for your team when you get the chance," Dupree told me. "I'm already thinking about Houston. This one's over."
These won't compensate for Shazier's absence. He was the player this defense could least afford to lose. But others need to rise up, even at other positions, and it was evident on one critical front that signal-calling -- mostly by Vince Williams and L.J. Fort -- had the group looking much more organized than the previous two weeks.
It's something.
• The bad: Antonio Brown got hurt.
It's awkward to even type that sentence, being that no one has since 2012. And it's never a positive to lose the NFL's very best player -- he should have been the unquestioned league MVP at the time he went down -- for any reason at any time. He'll be missed for however long that calf injury keeps him out, just as he was missed Sunday.
The good: Believe it or not, there is some. I can actually go three deep on this:
1. It doesn't sound that bad. ESPN reported it's a torn calf muscle, amid other national reports that proved to be dead wrong in the standard frenzy to get it first. But calves are tricky, and tears have multiple degrees, even those that are called partial.
What our site heard late Sunday night, directly from a source close to AB, is that doctors are basically referring to it as a bruise. Now, there are multiple degrees to bruises, too, but the sense around AB was that this isn't serious and shouldn't keep him out more than a couple weeks.
So big whoop, that means the Texans and Browns.
2. The timing, as laid out above, couldn't be better. Even if AB had been healthy for these next two games, all anyone would have done is cringe through every snap. For him, for Ben Roethlisberger, for Le'Veon Bell, for everyone.
Well, this is now a petri dish, a controlled environment. AB has roughly a month to heal not only the calf but also the toe that had been nagging him for a couple weeks. And as we've seen throughout his career, rust isn't exactly part of his repertoire.
3. More chances for the other receivers to really assert themselves, as all three -- JuJu Smith-Schuster, Martavis Bryant and Eli Rogers -- did Sunday, each with his best showing of the season.
• The bad: Rogers couldn't make that winning catch.
He'd already had one 18-yard touchdown earlier, and he was smart enough to have been one of the few people on the field -- either side -- to figure out that Roethlisberger wasn't spiking the ball.
Unfortunately, so did the Patriots' Eric Rowe. And Rowe got just enough of a tug on Rogers' back to keep him from gaining any separation:
"He just kind of grabbed me and changed how I was going to catch the ball," Rogers remembered. "I thought it was a flag."
It wasn't. The Patriots weren't going to get penalized in this game without committing first-degree felonies, for whatever reason.
Rowe himself sounded fortunate at how it played out.
"I see Big Ben fake it, and I'm, like, 'Oh, they're running a play,' " was Rowe's version. "I got my eye on the receiver and saw he was doing a slant. I didn't really think he was going to throw it because I was right on his hip."
It helped that he had illegally tugged on Rogers, but I'll let him finish.
"He threw it, and I was like, 'I need to break this up.' I thought they caught it, and I was, like, 'Oh, my God.' We came down with it, and I was ecstatic."
The Patriots were badly outnumbered to the contrary in that regard, as the largest NFL crowd in our city's history -- 68,574 in actual turnstile count -- fell so silent one could almost hear Rowe and his mates.
• The good: Bryant had four catches for 59 yards, including two of the prettiest he's made since the pre-suspension Martavis.
And JuJu ... we really should have been talking about nothing but JuJu on this day with his six catches for 114 yards, including the 69-yard sprint in the final minute to the New England 10 that set up the near-victory.
He's morphing into a game-breaker before our eyes. And it's always worth reminding. He's 21. He's the youngest player in the league.
I asked Roethlisberger how uplifting that facet of the game was from a quarterback's perspective:
Martavis' burst might be right at this same level of importance. Or more. A lot about him has been questionable for a long time, but the talent's never been on that list. That's special.
"I'm getting there," he told me with a wide smile. "I think we all are. We're only going to be stronger."
• The bad: Roethlisberger lost to Tom Brady.
• The good: Don't be that guy. Just don't. This is all so much more than same stale narrative.
While Brady was terrific in his own right, especially when sending 13 of his 35 passes toward his favorite target, Rob Gronkowski, Roethlisberger lost his top target in AB and was forced to spread his 30 targets in the following increments: 6, 6, 6, 5, 2, 1, 1 and the three to AB.
Still, Roethlisberger was the better quarterback, with a 110.6 rating to Brady's 87.6.
Roethlisberger's line: 22 of 30, 281 yards, two TDs and the weird pick at the end.
Brady's line: 22 of 35, 298 yards, one TD, one pick.
Brady himself praised Roethlisberger for a play that should have won the game but now no longer exists, in calling his strike to James "a really great throw, but they just couldn't come up with it."
Factor that in, too. If James does what Gronkowski would have done with that pass, everything's different.
• The bad: On the final play, the communication was a mess. Fifteen seconds were flicking away on a ticking clock, the Steelers were frantically setting themselves on third-and-goal at the New England 7, and Roethlisberger, from what we were told, was hearing Todd Haley shouting into his headset to not spike the ball.
Roethlisberger always prefers the spike, so he went behind center preparing to do exactly that, until Haley convinced him otherwise.
This quarterback has seldom passed up a chance to roll his coordinator under the bus when stuff goes awry, and he didn't this time, either. Though he didn't mention Haley -- and it's been widely misreported that the orders were coming from Tomlin -- it was. And as much as I've backed Roethlisberger in some of these, that won't happen this time.
Again, it was third down. If there's a spike, then a field goal try is next. One can argue that would be OK, as it at least settles matters and affords a shot in overtime. But one can more easily argue, I'd say, that there's no reason to not try for a touchdown with that much time, so long as it's not something stupid like a run up the middle.
The one thing that could have gone really wrong was exactly what went really wrong.
Tomlin could be seen on the sideline when it happened, glancing about with a what-the-heck-was-that glare, but he kept it innocuous afterward, saying simply, "We play and play to win. That's what we do."
Yeah, but that's not even touching on what really occurred.
• The good: Haley's hardly some hero. He's still yet to truly prove himself in a big-game setting.
That said, as both Tomlin and Roethlisberger would later acknowledge, the changes to an offensive game plan without the league's best player are "significant," per the head coach. And Haley deserves credit first for switching to a bigger package and emphasizing Bell and the run, a move that stroked his players' confidence at the right time, then later for the passing plays, notably the beauty to JuJu that was as well-designed as it was executed.
As Haley was telling me last week, "My job is to put my playmakers in the position to make plays."
He did that even without his best playmaker.
• The bad: The other coordinator didn't do nearly as well. And that's being kind.
There aren't simple solutions for Brady. And when Gronkowski's going as he did in the fourth quarter, there aren't any solutions for that physical freak.
I wasn't nearly as put off by having Davis cover Gronkowski, as he actually was all over the big man, if you kept a close eye.
Gronk himself went out of his to make that point when asked about all the seeming 50/50 balls Brady threw his way.
"They're a great team," he said of the Steelers. "They play hard. They hit hard. They cover well. You're not just going to be open."
It's to the credit of the quarterback and tight end that they connected as they did. Especially when the Steelers did have double-coverage on Gronk, which did happen at least once in a while, such as this too-late arrival from Mike Mitchell:
That said, for crying out loud, chip the guy.
This is the part that made zero sense. And I can attest that it's something we tracked the closest from the press box, counting no more than a handful of times when Butler had anyone make even nominal contact with Gronk at the line. On one snap -- not making this up -- there were two Steelers lined up across from Gronk, and neither so much as wished him well as he burst right through them untouched.
That general mistake freed up Gronk to run any route he pleased, including well down the field, without disrupting anyone's timing. It also afforded Brady the opportunity to release his pass before the rush became a factor.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Inexplicable.
• The good: Davis acquitted himself better than anyone, including Davis himself, will be willing to admit right now.
He took the Gronk catches hard, and he took his whiffed interception bid on New England's winning drive even harder.
"I needed to catch that," Davis said. "“I feel terrible. It's like letting a win slip out of your hands."
Fine, but if Davis had gotten even a fraction of the support he deserved from his coordinator in slowing Gronk at the line, his solid coverage wouldn't have needed to be nearly as dramatic.
He'll grow from this. Just ask him.
“I ain't scared of them," Davis said of the Patriots. "I ain't scared of Gronk. I ain't scared of Brady. None of us are. We're going to see them again. They're beatable. We had 'em. We've just got to do a better job of executing and put a dagger in 'em.”
• The bad: It's probably more like a wooden stake.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
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Steelers vs. Patriots, Heinz Field, Dec. 17, 2017. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS[/caption]
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