Mike Mitchell sat at his stall, head between his hands, staring straight down at the depths of whatever wicked mix of emotions must have been messing with his mind at the moment.
I know, I know. Not a solitary soul among Steelers Nation cares about Mitchell any more. I get that.
Stay with me.
The standard pack of microphones and cameras were poking into all corners of Heinz Field's home locker room, seeking anything that might resemble a reasonable explanation for what had just taken place. On this Sunday afternoon, Pittsburgh's proud football franchise, one that had been bound at least for Foxborough if not greater glory, was somehow brought to its collective knees by Blake Bortles and a bunch of other Florida-based dudes strutting their stuff amid 16-degree temps that were even chillier than the reception they should have expected here.
"That happened," David DeCastro would tell me afterward, slumped back but eyes wide. "That actually happened."
Yeah. It did.
"To be honest," Cam Heyward would essentially echo across the way, "I can't even process this right now. I really can't."
Me neither, man. I'm betting I'm not alone.
It's not that the Steelers won't be back at Gillette Stadium for an AFC Championship rematch. So much of this season had felt so ... uneven, I guess ... that nothing ever felt impossible. Not in any direction.
It's definitely not that the Jaguars aren't deserving. Any doubts about their dynamic defense led by Jalen Ramsey, or their ability to generate offense through Leonard Fournette despite not having some uber-stud at quarterback, or their joint smarts and resolve under Doug Marrone ... all of that just went firecracker in everyone's face. Mine, too.
But no, what genuinely feels so hard to fathom is how this happened.
And if we're being honest, how that should affect what comes next.
____________________
Mitchell eventually rose up, walking slowly in the direction of Heyward, the defensive captain who'd been holding informal court with a few teammates but was now free. Mitchell plopped himself down by his side, clasped his hands around his knees and began to express concern about the future. Meaning the team's.
"I'm worried," Mitchell would say, "they're going to blow this up."
No. They won't, actually. That would be beyond insane.
Mike Tomlin will still be the head coach, as he will for the foreseeable future. There will be all the requisite grousing about decisions on this day, or the sluggish start, or the overall underperformance. Much of that will be fair, particularly as relates to the failed onside kick late in the game. (More on that in a spell.) But the rational perspective spotlights that we're talking about the most successful first 11 years of any NFL head coach other than Don Shula. And about winning 22 of the past 27 games, with four of those five losses coming to the Patriots and these Jaguars. And about having guided the group through all manner of bona fide adversity.
Repeating for emphasis: There's no rational discussion about the Steelers that begins with replacing Tomlin.
Just to flick that out of the way early here.
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TAP FOR BOXSCORE, PLAY-BY-PLAY, HIGHLIGHTS[/caption]
There won't be a blowup of the roster, either. At least there won't be based on the surprisingly strong signal sent by a surprisingly drama-free Ben Roethlisberger after this, when he told us regarding next season, "I definitely have a desire to play football," and added of his linemen, "I look forward to next year with those guys."
That's as close as anyone could get to a blowup, and it was just blown up.
The line's all signed. They'll all be back. Antonio Brown and the younger receivers will be back, with the likely exception of Martavis Bryant after all his mayhem. The tight ends will be back, and Vance McDonald's seldom seemed more pivotal than he was Sunday.
Le'Veon Bell?
Go ahead and believe all his bluster between now and the next kickoff, or even rap along with his rhymes. But it'll be a spectacular waste of anyone's summer to think any athlete anywhere will leave $17 million on the table because of some principle regarding the NFL's usage of the franchise tag. It won't happen. He'll get tagged again. Maybe there will or won't be an extension. Either way, he'll play.
He spoke hopefully of his future in Pittsburgh after the game, then tweeted this after leaving the building:
I love my guys!!! my brothers kept fightin, we’ll be back 😉 pic.twitter.com/TqEbHC1Jjm
— Le'Veon Bell (@L_Bell26) January 14, 2018
The offense will be intact.
In fact, so will most of the 53-man. Other than Bell, the other unrestricted free agents are Arthur Moats, Chris Hubbard, Sean Spence, Justin Hunter, Stevan Ridley, Dan McCullers and Fitz Toussaint, most of whom need to show ID to get by Heinz Field security.
The defense needs work. But again, no blowup.
With all due respect to Ryan Shazier's recovery, an inside linebacker is atop that list. And never since Shazier's injury was that more apparent than on this day, when Fournette double-fisted his way through the middle, banging bodies backward and, ultimately, forcing the Steelers' secondary to move closer to the line for support. (More on that in a spell, too.) Vince Williams fared well overall in succeeding Lawrence Timmons, but another L.T. prototype -- a big, fast tackling machine -- is needed now more than ever.
And with all due respect to Mitchell's passion, a free safety will be on that list, too. He's got one more year with $5 million to go, but that can be bought out. Or, if that isn't cap-friendly enough -- it's a $8,135,418 hit for 2018 -- then another arrangement can be made. But that arrangement has to involve another player starting. All too often with this defense, we've seen that big plays become bigger plays. That's usually on Mitchell, as he's often pointed out himself, and it's not an accident. He'll turn 31 in June and is many hard miles removed from his peak athleticism.
Otherwise, though, where are the issues?
No one was at their best Sunday, but the front line is set for years with Heyward, Stephon Tuitt and Javon Hargrave, the outside linebackers T.J. Watt and Bud Dupree are top draft picks, and the secondary's got a good mix of older and younger in Joe Haden, Sean Davis, Artie Burns, Mike Hilton and two other seriously promising kids in Cam Sutton and Brian Allen.
Still, we're talking about two starting positions out of 22, at least from this perspective.
Two.
Not even the Browns would blow that up.
____________________
After the dialogue with Heyward, Mitchell rose up and walked toward the big gray tub in the center of the room where the players are required to drop their jerseys and other garments. Rodgers Freyvogel, the Steelers' equipment manager since Chuck Noll hired him in 1980 and the most stable presence of all within an organization famous for the trait, was dutifully waiting there to collect.
Maybe that's what did it. Mitchell broke down.
"I'm afraid to take it off," he would say upon beginning to tug at his jersey. "I don't know if I'll ever have the chance to wear it again."
He might not. Change will come. Change has to come, to some degree.
Let's face it: If all the 2018 Steelers needed to become the consummate NFL team was one linebacker and one safety, chances are excellent that the 2017 edition would currently be packing for Massachusetts rather than looking and sounding so awestruck about all that went wrong Sunday.
But all that did go wrong. Which means there have got to be other reasons for it.
I'm feeling, more firmly than ever, that those reasons are Tomlin's coordinators.
No, I'm not going to turn Bill-from-Blawnox here and rip Todd Haley and/or Keith Butler just because of one lousy loss. But it's been a half-dozen years now since Haley took over from Bruce Arians, three years since Butler took over for Dick LeBeau, and the indisputable fact is that neither has exactly burnished his own brand in that span. Not locally. Not nationally. And it's becoming increasingly clear there's cause for that.
In Haley's case, it's especially maddening. He gets to play chess with pieces that would be the envy of exactly 31 other offensive coordinators, and yet there's consistently a lack of creativity in scripting plays even as there's this bizarre compulsion to attempt creativity when none is required. He sticks with chess when checkers would suffice.
If that sounds confounding, that's because it is.
So let's demonstrate instead ...
That was the Jaguars' sixth touchdown and final dagger, and it might look not much more significant than the standard play-action. But to witness it within the full scope of a 60-minute rhythm, it was a work of art. Fournette had been blowing through the tackles all day, so the defense's bite on the run has to be real. As a result, it's the fullback, Tommy Bohanon, who slips undetected through everyone for the easiest touchdown catch of his adult life.
"We're all having fun in this offense," Bohanon would beam later, "even us big guys."
I'll bet. A play that slick could have been pulled off by the grounds crew.
Look again at the Steelers on the sequence. Williams is fooled so badly he falls on his face. Robert Golden turns three different directions in the span of 1.5 seconds. Sean Spence is about as engaged as the nearest ref.
Do you know the name of Jacksonville's offensive coordinator?
I didn't, either, but it's Nathaniel Hackett, son of the former Pitt coach Paul Hackett, and you'd better believe people around football are mentioning it after this. He's 37, he took over as Jacksonville's coordinator seven games into last season, and he's made an immediate impact despite ... you know, Bortles. That guy just drew up a plan that got Bortles to match Dan Marino's record for most points produced in a playoff game against the Steelers. That brand just got burnished.
The Steelers did score 42 points, and that's all some will cull from this when weighing Haley. But it wouldn't be right. Because this game, as with so, so, so many others in his tenure -- even this season with the best offensive talent the team's had in a decade or more -- never found any of that rhythm. When there was success, it was the direct result of individual brilliance on the part of Roethlisberger, Brown and Bell.
That's the pattern, right?
Those are all wonderful. But they're also all the Steelers get. They don't set the tempo. They don't eat the clock. They don't tire out the opposing defense. On this day, they converted 4 of their first 11 third-down opportunities, and they ended up facing third down 16 times. Because there's no rhythm. And ultimately, the Killer Bs just bail out the coordinator.
To stress this anew, I'm not singling out this game or even this coordinator. Many mistakes were made Sunday, even by Roethlisberger within throwing for 469 yards against the NFL's No. 1 defense.
But I am reiterating that the lack of rhythm has been virtually omnipresent from the first snap in Cleveland to the first three drives of this game netting a deflating return of a punt, an interception -- on an odd out route by a tight end -- and a turnover on downs.
Score once or twice there, and the Jaguars might never had found all that life.
Then again, maybe they would have, since Butler's defense was destroyed all day. That began with the eight-play, 66-yard drive shoved down their throats right after deferring on the kickoff. And talk about burnishing Hackett's brand: Bortles and Fournette went left, right, middle, run, pass, play-action, short to the tight end, then -- pow! -- Fournette through the line for the 1-yard score.
It's almost as if the opening series was scripted.
Oh, wait, all opening series are.
Haley, meanwhile, was falling into another familiar trap by trying to show everyone how smart he is on not one but two fourth-and-1 flubs that might well have defined the outcome, since both were followed by Jacksonville touchdowns:
Believe it or not, I don't have a problem with the second one. For one, although Roethlisberger is 18 of 19 in his career on fourth-and-1 sneaks, that hasn't been part of his repertoire for years, as he'd acknowledge. For another, that was one of two balls to hit JuJu Smith-Schuster on both hands and clang off. He's got to make that catch, even with the tight coverage of the superb A.J. Bouye. He had a rough playoff debut.
But that first one ... my God, that was a toss sweep.
To the NFL's premier running back.
Behind a $58 million line.
From fewer than 36 inches away.
And, to continue the theme here, it was hardly exclusive to Sunday ...
Todd Haley: calling toss sweeps on fourth and short in the playoffs for nearly a decade now. pic.twitter.com/d8OTFHF0Cd
— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) January 14, 2018
Add to all that the longstanding nonsense between Roethlisberger and Haley, and that it might mean plenty to Ben to see Randy Fichtner, his beloved and trusted quarterbacks coach, promoted to coordinator, and it only seems to push the case for change. Remember, both coordinators' contracts are up after this season.
Tomlin, as ever, stood by his men. Any good coach would.
Of the fourth-and-1 toss sweep, he said, "I felt comfortable with that. They packed the As and Bs. We didn't execute well enough, and they did."
Also, of the defensive coverage often looking confused, he said, "I wouldn't call it confusion. It was poor execution, to be honest with you. I wouldn't characterize it as confusion."
Yeah, uh, no. Go back up and look at Williams, Golden and Spence on that fullback touchdown. Or at any number of other messes.
Or, for that matter, ask the players themselves.
"When we'd blitz, he'd go right over us," Williams said of Bortles. "When we'd stay back, he'd go underneath. He did a really good job. They played really well."
The Jaguars did. Full credit. But it doesn't excuse that the Steelers were badly outsmarted and outschemed, given that their opponent should have been rendered as one-dimensional as it had been by most opponents through the season. Instead, they were the ones looking around in a daze.
I asked Heyward about the decision to blitz a lot early, then not at all in the second half:
I asked Mitchell about the impact of Bortles' screen passes, which had the Steelers guessing way more than necessary:
The killer came early in the fourth quarter when Bortles, who normally doesn't seek any target beyond his nose, heaved a ball 45 yards to Keelan Cole:
See any safeties in that picture?
Nope, and I asked Davis why.
"We were up at the line, and the rest was man coverage," he explained. "The way they were running the ball, all those screens, we had to be close."
The Jaguars tried that play twice in the second half. That one worked. But the Steelers' defense having no real identity, no discernible confidence, no sense that they'll dictate terms, that's been the case for all of Butler's tenure. And it isn't good enough.
Neither coordinator has performed at a championship level. Tomlin, Kevin Colbert and Art Rooney II need to intensely consider if they've got the right people running their Xs and Os. Because it sure doesn't look that way.
____________________
Mitchell eventually spoke with reporters for a few minutes, though Colbert -- highly unusual as a presence in the room, never mind an active one -- stepped in to cut off questions.
And in all the time Mitchell was migrating, one player sat all alone, his uniform untouched, his expression unchanged. No one went near him, not his teammates, not even some of the family and friends that had entered.
Artie Burns was the one beaten on that bomb to Cole.
"I'm here for Artie, but this isn't about Artie," Davis told me a few feet away. "We all had a bad day."
Bad day. If observing this game as a newcomer to the planet, I could see that.
We all love to define miserable losses by miserable specifics. In this case, the obvious culprits are the fourth-and-1s and Tomlin's call for the onside kick. And given the fan base's growing impatience for the head coach to win a second Super Bowl, it's a guarantee the latter will inflate beyond recognition. My own feeling before Chris Boswell lined up was that I'd rather see an onside kick than the defense getting gashed again, and apparently Tomlin felt the same in defending the call: "We wanted to get the ball back. We hadn't stopped them convincingly enough to take any other approach, in my opinion."
The Jaguars scored five offensive touchdowns, and their previous three drives brought two touchdowns and a field goal. The Steelers' defense was wretched. That wasn't Tomlin's opinion or anyone's opinion. It was fact.
The bad day was a bad day all-around. For Tomlin, too. And most of his players. It wasn't made any easier by seeing Shazier in the room afterward and feeling, as so many shared, that they let him down, too:
The emotions run deep, as that shows. Maurkice Pouncey could only say, "I just need to see my family. I need to go," to both questions I asked. Tuitt could barely speak a syllable.
But when this settles, when they all get done denying they weren't looking ahead to the Patriots -- I can't even conceive of such nonsense, although the perception surely didn't help -- they'll all have to get beyond the bad day and dig a lot deeper to solve these bad outcomes.
"We get so close," Brown would say. "It's frustrating. We're right there."
They are. Better ideas are needed.
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