Pittsburgh Steelers' Wild Card Loss a Total Team Effort

And so it ends. What had been a miraculous turnaround season for the Pittsburgh Steelers ended in the first round of the NFL playoffs with an ugly loss to the Baltimore Ravens. The score was 30-17, but with the number of mistakes the Steelers made, it could have been much worse.

Oftentimes, when a team loses, you can point to a unit or an aspect of the game as the impetus for the loss. Pittsburgh decided that rather than have anyone feel left out, the team would spread the sorrow across the entirety of the roster as best it could.

Penalties

It seems that everything old is new again. Penalties had been the bane of this team for much of the first half of the season. However, Pittsburgh seemed to have turned the corner with much more disciplined football. Just a week before, the Steelers beat the Cincinnati Bengals for the AFC North crown, and only committed a single penalty.

Saturday night against the Ravens the wheels came off completely. The Steelers committed eight penalties for a mind-numbing 114 yards against Baltimore. A couple of these penalties really stood out.

Gene Puskar/Associated Press

The first was at the 12:31 mark of the third quarter. The Ravens chose to take a shot deep on 3rd-and-2. Quarterback Joe Flacco gets a clean pocket and fires deep to wide receiver Torrey Smith. The pass falls incomplete, but Pittsburgh cornerback Antwon Blake gets dinged for a 32-yard pass interference call that keeps a drive going that turns into a field goal.

The other biggie was in the fourth quarter at the 4:47 mark. The Steelers are trying to rally and have the ball at the Baltimore 19-yard line. Roethlisberger finds running back Dri Archer in the short flat and he is gone for an easy touchdown. Archer’s run was exactly the electrifying play everyone had been hoping to see from him, and it would have pulled the Steelers to within one score with over four minutes to play.

Unfortunately, a hold on offensive tackle Kelvin Beachum nullified the touchdown, and the drive then culminated in an interception by Roethlisberger after he is knocked out of the game for three plays. If you look up worst-case scenario in the dictionary, you’ll find this series. 

Sacks

All the talk in the pregame was about how the Ravens had 49 sacks on the season, but only five of them came in two games against the Steelers. And in fairness, in the first game, all three of those Ravens’ sacks came on consecutive plays.

This meant that something had to give. Would the Steelers offensive line keep up their performance against Baltimore again, or would the swarming Ravens defense be too much for the one-dimensional Pittsburgh offense?

Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

Now we know it would be the latter. Without a viable rushing attack, Baltimore was able to simply tee off on the Steelers offensive line and brought pressure in waves. The Ravens notched five sacks on Saturday night, two of which came from defensive tackles Brandon Williams and Haloti Ngata, and another to backup linebacker Courtney Upshaw. Everyone but the hot dog guy got a hit on Roethlisberger it seemed.

I understand that the pressure was on the Pittsburgh offensive line to perform without running back Le’Veon Bell. That was an unenviable task for sure. However, the Steelers coaches didn’t make the needed adjustments to help out the offensive line. Tackles Beachum and Marcus Gilbert were left on an island, and they had no luck building a shelter.

The Bell Effect

The Steelers loss on Saturday was set into motion back on November 18. As reported then by NFL.com’s Dan Hanzus, the Steelers released Blount just one day after Blount left the sideline during the game because he was frustrated with his lack of reps in a victory over the Tennessee Titans.

Gene J. Puskar/Associated Press

At the time, the move was prudent. What Blount did was wrong, and no one really seemed concerned about the shape the depth chart was left in. I honestly thought the Steelers would bring in a veteran running back at that point. However, running back hubris kicked in, and head coach Mike Tomlin assumed that Bell was immune to injury, so having a viable backup wasn’t a concern.

However, rather than bring a veteran into the fold early on, so they could assimilate to the offense, Pittsburgh ignored the problem. So, when Bell went down with injury, the Steelers front office got to scramble for scraps and tried to bring running back Ben Tate up to speed in three days.

We can all debate the impact one part of the offense had on another, but it is painfully obvious after Saturday’s loss that what Bell did for the passing game, as well as the offensive line, was far more significant than first thought.