That’s a pretty good point - by rights, Byron Leftwich should have been sacked about a dozen times a game behind that line.
It really makes you wonder if Big Ben would take fewer sacks if he’d just stay still so the linemen aren’t always wondering where the hell he went.
That’s how the Bengals managed to sack him 4 times and hit him several others in their last meeting. The Bengals defense did a good job of keeping him inside the pocket, which is not necessarily Ben’s happy place.
I’m very concerned about Roethlisberger taking a hard hit by that Ravens defense. You know that they’re going to be targeting him more than usual. One more concussion and I think the Steelers’ season is over.
I think that they should play Dixon even if it means losing the game. They’d still have a good chance of making the playoffs, and the Steelers are the one team for who home field seems to make little difference. I think that they’re probability of winning the Super Bowl is pretty much the same whether they’re a 6 seed or a 1 seed.
I also should add that I read a piece about concussions. They claimed that it’s not the 1st hard hit to the brain thats the problem, but less-severe hits following the initial one that cause major issues and yield more concussions. My concern is not just for this year, but for future years as well. He’s truly a rare find and it could take years of rebuilding if his career is destroyed…not to mention his own quality of life after football.
He’s already had two on-field concussions and didn’t miss the next game either time.
Dutch Wydo at PostgameHeroes put up a few numbers that just reinforce my discomfort with the current Steeler offensive gameplan:
If those guys can’t do it neither can Ben Roethlisberger. We need to find a way to get more balance on this team. They’re ranked something like 26th in turnover ratio because of this high-risk attack they’ve adopted. Not good.
Maybe so, but how sustainable is that?
Hey guys, don’t get down about Dixon. I have an old SI talking about Heisman hopefuls, and he was a top 10 college QB in the country before he tore his ACL. When he got drafted in the 5th, I was shocked.
The much bigger concern is the loss of Polamalu. It’s very, very clear that the passing defense is built around him, and without him, Arians doesn’t know what the heck to do. When Troy’s there, he can make the Cover 2 work. Without Troy, they play a deep Cover 2, which makes no sense at all, particularly when they have Ike Taylor who can cover 1 on 1 and in some of their losses, the other team didn’t have more than 1 credible threat.
Watching their CB’s play 10 yards off the line makes me sick. They should bump and run (giving their pass rush more time) or mix it up.
Re: Rothlisberger: I think it’s ok that he passes a lot. The problem though is that he hates the short pass. Mewelde Moore is dangerous out of the dump off, and I’m pretty sure Willie and Rashard know how to catch a ball sometimes.
That analysis totally confuses cause and effect. Teams throw the ball 40 times because they’re losing.
Now, occasionally they may get behind because the threw the ball 40 times, and that appears to have been the case in the Steelers-Chiefs game, but the majority of the time it’s the other way around.
He’s not a great passer. He only threw for 2100 yards as a senior and 20 scores. The reason he was so highly rated is that he rushed for ~600 yards and 8 touchdowns on top of that- but quarterbacks who can’t throw for big yardage totals don’t make good NFL prospects, regardless of their rushing ability.
I’m OK with them playing Gay deep as long as they can execute the plays. Gay has been a reliable tackler most of the time and they seem to be inviting those short throws in front of him because it allows them to protect the flats better while still blitzing. The Cardinals exposed some weaknesses in the flats during the Super Bowl and it’s been necessary to make changes to combat that. I’m amazed at how often they’ve been dropping Woodley into coverage on his side. His sack totals haven’t been as impressive this year but teams haven’t been making him look too bad either other than that play against the Bengals where he seemed to waffle on whether to go for the ball or not and wound up flat-footed.
Polamalu’s loss has been pretty big though. No one else on this team can blow up gaps or disguise coverage like he does.
With the Steelers defense, there’s almost never a time that they have to throw 40 times because they are that far behind.
They threw 40 times in the last Cincinnati game, which they lost by less than a touchdown and in which they never trailed by more than a field goal until less than 2 minutes were left in the game.
Heck, they passed 35 times in the Chicago loss and 31 times in the first Cincinnati game, and they led most of the game in both of those losses. Passing, and failing to sustain late offensive drives was part of the reason they lost those games.
So that’s why Timmy Chang (set the WAC record in yardage and touchdowns) went undrafted and Colt Brennan (who broke Chang’s records) went in the 5th?
I guess Tebow should just quit football forever.
Seriously though, I think regardless of yardage or rushing skills, the decision-making ability is key for NFL success, and there’s no real way to tell unless they play.
It’s giving up the 5-7 yard pass every single play on the three step drop that is driving me crazy. If they gave Woodley and Harrison even one more step, they would be dominating in the 4th. Everybody knows that the Steelers give up the short yardage every single time in the 4th.
I’m going to have to agree here: winning teams run. Passing alone can’t win games, can’t close out games, and gives the defense extra opportunities to take it away and make sacks.
Defenses now are playing nickle and dime packages after the half every single time, because they know Ben will try to hit the home run. They have got to run more in the 2nd half, or even pass more to the RB’s to keep the defense honest.
I didn’t say throwing for lots of yards made you a good prospect - just that throwing for minimal yardage nearly always makes you a bad one.
Just out of curiosity, I didn’t get to see Leftwich play much as a Steeler. Was he a guy you could build a team around or more of a solid backup for an injured star?
That’s a good question. He looked better passing for the Steelers than any other time I’ve seen him although truthfully I didn’t pay as much attention when he was with other teams. If he could maintain the level of play we saw from him you could certainly win with him back there. Whether teams would have found ways to get to him more as the game tape piled up is another question though. I would consider him more of a solid back-up right now. Certainly the offense didn’t have to be limited with him in there. Sometimes your back-up goes in and you need to trim the playbook a lot; I think with Leftwich they probably still reduced the number of plays but not by nearly as much as they would have to with Batch back there. He has a cannon for an arm but he’s also slow to get the ball out of his hands. Maybe teams would have capitalized on that had he played some more.
Re: Aging quarterbacks:
Imho, one of the greatest weaknesses of a QB is arm strength. There’s a certain speed where you gain an incredible advantage over the defense. I remember watching one of the Packer games while Favre was still there and Madden or somebody was talking about the advantages of arm strength, and that even a slight decrease can end a qb’s career. This is often given as the de-facto reason why Culpepper can’t play anymore.
I haven’t heard much about Leftwich, but my guess would be that his arm isn’t NFL-caliber anymore.
Random thought:
After Richard Seymour went to Oakland, there was talk that Davis was willing to trade him for a 3rd round pick. I was thinking in my mind that it was a great deal, and around that time, Aaron Smith went down. Looking back, I think he would have been a huge pickup for the Steelers. The week after the deadline passed, he had a monster game, so Oakland was then happy with the trade.
Agree?
Great leader, great downfield passer, bad quarterback. Guy just never learned how to throw with touch; everything was a bullet with a huge windup. I blame Jacksonville’s quarterbacks coaches.
When he was drafted, I would have bet dollars to doughnuts he’d be a star. He posted big numbers at Marshall back when the MAC was the best of the mid-major conferences with minimal talent around him (he took over for Chad Pennington, but Pennington had Randy Moss; Leftwich had Olandis Gary and Darius Watts).
It was a game against… Miami of Ohio, I think, when he broke his leg early in the fourth quarter and was carried up the field by his linemen after each completion to take the next snap… and brought the team back from a 21-point deficit and got the win.
Unfortunately, he just never learned to be a complete passer.