Hopefully after Sunday the division will look like this:
Cincinnati 2-0
Ratbirds 1-1
Stealers 1-1
Browns 0-2
Looks like I was wrong. Man. The defense just isn’t very good. Of course, when you have penalties for head shots that hit the shoulder it doesn’t help, not to mention 2 fumbles and an inability to generate takeaways.
This might be a long year. Every team loses a few games sooner or later, so I’m not hanging it up just yet, but they have to get better or they’re in trouble.
Steelers defense either is out of shape, or they’ve just given up.
And you will inevitably post this. Look, dude, when you create threads with such ignorant and arrogant titles as “…Steelers March to the Super Bowl,” especially with the Steelers in their current condition, sane people have a moral obligation to state the obvious. At least you reluctantly admitted the Steelers aren’t very good in your last post.
Very insightful.
I had to record the game and finally watched it. For all the handwringing about the Defense though, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. They stopped them on the goal line and defended the few deep passes well. Cam Thomas is terrible and the players are being flagged for every decent hit. Upshaw’s hit on Roethlisberger, for instance, was hard but looked quite legal to me. It also seemed to shake Ben up. Same story as last year, both lines have to improve.
Not pretty but no need to panic yet. I hate the Thursday games and neither team is going to be sharp with the short preparation. This same game later in the season would be more dispiriting but I saw a few promising signs. On offense I love some of the playcalls like the TE screen. Those could have set some nice things up but the offensive line is pretty weak, especially on the left side.
Defense? Hard to judge from this game but Cam Thomas looked really bad and neither Shazier nor Mitchell looked very good tackling. The Ravens usually go deep a lot but settled for a lot of short passes here. The Steelers never adjusted though. We’ll see. I like the speed of the LBs, maybe we’ll see Tuitt in there and find out what he’s made of. All he has to do to be better than Thomas is not wipe out half his teammates.
I never saw this game coming. The Panthers are being shut down and humiliated. Cam Newton is getting rocked. The Steelers are succeeding even though Haley calls a run on 2nd and 22 from the Pittsburgh 6. Two turnovers, one to the strains of Yakety Sax from the special teams, two playground improvisations from Ben to Antonio Brown… it’s been a wild night.
But it’s come at a cost. Goddamn Ike Taylor was essentially retired tonight when his own teammate Theismanned his forearm. Ryan Shazier is out with a knee injury of unknown severity, and it looked ugly. Jarvis Jones hurt his wrist. If they win this it will be a classic Pyrrhic victory.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now. If the injures to Shazier and Jones are bad the defense will be even more fragile, which would be a shame after they finally woke up tonight.
More concerned about Ike’s injury than Shazier. I like Spence and Williams and think they can fill in well. As excited as I am about seeing Shazier develop I think those guys can handle the job and could use some reps as well. Lebeau seems to have a lot of confidence in Blake stepping into the Nickel while Gay moves to fill in for Taylor but I’m nervous. Fear of the unknown but still…
And in other news, two 100 yard rushers in one game. Fuck yeah!
Today’s big news is that James Harrison is coming back to the Steelers. I can’t begin to understand why they did this, he’s probably going to be ineffective, he certainly was in his last year with the team. I guess it’s because he knows the defense. We’ll see what happens. And we’ll see how many fines he draws.
Yeah, they need a OLB who knows the defense. Moats is gonna be starting, Harrison will be backing him up.
This is the AFC North general discussion thread, right?
So anyway, I’m really impressed with Kyle Shanahan. I reflexively tend to doubt anything that looks like nepotism, so I wasn’t sure if he was someone that really belonged in the NFL, but he’s done a bang up job.
Where do you think the Browns are on FO’s team offense DVOA stat? 20th? maybe 14th? Third.
With the great Bryan Hoyer at QB, two rookies at running back, no one but a smurf at receiver, and backup tight ends. Shanahan has done a great job creating open receivers by scheming them open, because there’s no talent there. Miles Austin is washed up and runs extremely leisurely routes that beg for defenders to jump them, the #3 receiver is a UDFA rookie, and the only good receiver is like 5’7 175. And yet Hoyer’s QB rating is 97.5, despite him missing a whole lot of open throws with weird brain farts or bad throws. A top tier QB would be tearing it up even with an epically bad receiving corps.
O-line has been very good. Not dominant, but top 10 easily, probably creeping up to top 5. Rookie Bitonio has been fantastic right from the beginning.
The team’s supposed strength, the defense, is actually last in team DVOA. It’s had a few utterly dominant quarters to contrast with others which were comically bad. I can’t quite figure it out. But they’re anti-clutch. There’s clearly potential there, like when you saw them hold Pittsburgh in the second half to a last second field goal, or when they held Drew Brees to 24 passing yards over his first 5 or 6 possessions. But then there are times they just wave the offense through.
The corner play has been pretty bad, and Pettine’s scheme relies on being able to put corners on an island. Joe Haden got abused by Jimmy Graham, but I suppose there’s not anyone in the league who can dominate him on one on one coverage. The fact that they demanded it over and over again while Graham ripped them up was a defensive scheme problem. But even so, Haden is anti-clutch and being burned regularly. First round pick Gilbert has been a disaster in two weeks and pretty decent in one. I mean, full blown dumpster fire disaster in those two games. Buster Skrine has actually been really good, and since about halfway through last year, the Browns’ best corner. Haden gets the recognition as a high draft pick, but Skrine is really good.
I don’t know what got into Paul Kruger, but it’s been pretty great. Big free agent signing last year who was a solid all-rounder that rarely looked dominant, he’s been looking dominant a lot this year, just powering his way through tackles routinely, causing all sorts of disruption. Mingo is looking like a bust, and he’s taking 70% of snaps even though the defense looks better when Sheard replaces him. They really want to make Mingo happen, and it’s just not working.
Special teams has sucked ass. I think this is mostly on the coordinator, and I have to wonder how bad you have to be as a ST coach to get fired in mid-season, as he deserves to. We lost the Ravens game to a blocked field goal that fans spotted last week would happen. There were people who posted, with pictures, saying how dumb our protection scheme was on field goals and that we were going to get one blocked from the right side doing it as we were, and boom, next week, blocked field goal exactly as they said it would be. They have a guy returning punts - Travis Benjamin - who has been terrified of touching the football since his knee got wrecked on a punt return last year. He calls fair catches when there isn’t anyone within 15 yards of him, and looks like he’s terrified to touch the ball. It boggles my mind that he’s still out there returning punts. Considering the Browns have lost 2 games only on last second field goals, that extra field position he’s blowing could easily be the difference. But there are so many poor choices and schemes on special teams they could probably replace Tabor mid-season with a high school coach and improve.
That’s the one area the Browns have actually performed well in historically, special teams. They’ve had a series of great returners, an underrated all time great kicker, and Brad Seely being among the best ST coaches in the league. Almost every year for a decade they had top 5-10 special teams, and having to worry about routine punt returns and 40 yard field goals is bullshit.
Aside from this having all the hallmarks of a trap game I’m excited about a few things heading into the next game. That includes some tempered excitement about Harrison returning. His career is done and we can’t expect much pass rushing from him but he’s stayed in great shape and has always been solid stopping the run. Guys like Shazier and Jarvis Jones will pick up a thing or two in that regard and from his work ethic assuming that hasn’t changed (he was pretty committed to retirement after all). I also want to see how Spence looks in there. I would say he’s as good as Shazier overall. We might also get to see Dri Archer get some plays in. They will be burst or bust but still…he has the speed to work some magic and seems much more skilled than the other speedy midgets they have tried in that role (Logan, Rainey, et al).
So they put Jarvis Jones on the IR with the return designation to make room for Harrison, while Goddamn Ike Taylor is claiming he’ll be back again this year so he’ll be eating a roster spot. Shazier might be out as many as 5 weeks, has a sprained MCL and is week-to-week, surely better than a torn ACL or something equally devastating but not exactly great news.
Is it wrong to look past this game? The Bucs are terrible in ways that I didn’t know teams could be. They might be mad and playing for pride after last week’s debacle in Atlanta, but I don’t know if pride can make them any better.
Now watch, the Steelers will go out and lay down like dogs for these guys, either keeping them in the game until the end or simply chucking it to them altogether. But man, it shouldn’t happen that way. It should take a combination of Tampa playing way over their heads and Pittsburgh simply giving the game away for it to be within 10 points.
So far so good in Bengals land. 3-0, fewest points allowed in the NFL by the defense, fewest sacks given up in the league by the offensive line (zero), only one turnover on offense against six or seven generated by the defense…plus Hue Jackson’s “new” offense centered around quick drops and releases for Dalton and running the shit out of the rock with Bernard and rookie Jeremy Hill…so far so good.
Big test coming up against NE in their place next Sunday though…
Ike Taylor only looked bad last year because they had no safety help with all the issues up front and opposing OCs knew it. His loss is bigger than the armchair scouts who rely on numbers over tape would have is believe. That could be very good if it leads to Allen and others stepping up to fill the void. I don’t think it will though and that will lead to today’s game being a lot dicier on the defensive side of the ball.
That was as bad a result as I ever hoped to see. First the bad start, then the Steelers have it under control, then they just choked it away. I would have been much happier had I been wrong earlier. But noooooo, another week of Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh. I can only wonder which team will show up next week.
Friggin’ penalties. Just embarrassing after a while.
Not much pressure on Glennon today; that has to change.
My Fox station switched to the game just in time for me to see them fuck it all up.
Ouch. It wasn’t that bad in the first half. When they got the ball back inside the two minute warning I went out to play with my kids and went back to shut off the television just in time to gasp in disbelief (but sadly not real disbelief).
Browns are having a game of two halves almost identical to week 1. Hopefully this one ends differently.
It did. The Browns are for real. I hate them already.
As for the Steelers, they let the Jagwaggers hang around all day yet again, but a pick-six snatched all hope. The defense needs so much help I don’t know where to begin. If the pass rush doesn’t get to the quarterback he has all the time in the world to pick apart the porous secondary. The penalties are still ridiculous, especially from a guy like Lance Moore, who should really know better than to do what he did, and then compounded the error by arguing with Tomlin on the way off the field. He was lucky to get off the end of the bench for the rest of the game.
Somehow the offense is a top-5 unit. I can’t figure out how. The end zone is kryptonite to Haley, because when they get in close he does everything he can to keep from getting in it.
So many holes. This team has so much potential but can’t seem to live up to it. They still have an easy schedule and the playoffs are theirs for the taking, but they have to take it.