What The Steelers Coach And Players Are Saying About Their Cardboard Defense

Do Troy or Ryan have any answers on defense?

      “I like the attitude, demeanor and approach to work that the guys have taken,” Mike Tomlin said. “That’s just part of the equation. Obviously, putting it together and producing victory is the most significant part of the equation.”“We have to minimize the big plays,” he said. “I think that has been an issue for us ... We just need to get more solid in that area, minimize big plays and make people work to produce points against us. That’s how we’ve done it for a long period of time. We have to quickly get back to that.”

      The lack of takeaways has the Pittsburgh Steelers on the verge of establishing a dubious mark. No team in NFL history has failed to record a takeaway five games into a season. The Steelers are at four games, and the players are still at a loss to explain what has to happen for the defense to start forcing turnovers. Turnovers, or the lack thereof, are a key again for the Steelers defense. But Troy Polamalu, said that securing them isn't just a product of what a defense does on the football field. "We've got to get more out of our offense as well. And we need splash plays from our special teams. So, turnovers aren't just a defensive thing."

      "I think the biggest thing we need to do more of is more people getting to the ball," safety, Ryan Clark said. "When you get multiple hats on the ball that gives the second guys opportunities to pull at the ball, try to get it out. So as a team I think that's a thing we can work on more." "Last year I had two interceptions and forced two fumbles and it just happened," free safety Ryan Clark said. "Sometimes those plays just come." But defenses have to make those plays happen too, Clark acknowledged.

      "Anytime we underperform, we let defensive coordinator, Dick LeBeau down, and we haven't performed very well during these first four games," Polamalu said. "Of course, he's displeased, as displeased as we are with what we've seen on film. It's tough to accept, being 0-4, but it's the state of what we are right now. We've put together 0-4 efforts and have executed an 0-4 style. "As a defense, we definitely have to stop the run first and we have to force teams to get into third-and-long situations, which teams have done a good job against us by not getting into those situations," Polamalu said.

The Steelers Are Still In A Fog After Leaving London Losers

Ben Roethlisberger Loses The Ball Again

       With the Pittsburgh Steelers off to their worst start in 45 years, Ben Roethlisberger isn't mincing words about where the team stacks up against the rest of the NFL. "Right now, you could say we're the worst team in the league," after Pittsburgh fell 34-27 to the Minnesota Vikings at Wembley Stadium on Sunday. "That hurts." The Steelers' defense gave up nearly 400 yards and again failed to force a turnover. Pittsburgh is without a takeaway this season.

        Roethlisberger was sacked five times and harassed all game by Jared Allen and the Vikings, the Steelers dropped to 0-4, their worst start since 1968, when they lost their first six games en route to a 2-11-1 record. “We are in uncharted territory, and the water is dangerous right now. It stings. I have to hope and believe we can turn it around. That's the approach I'm going to take this week and next week. I'm going to do the best I can to lead these guys and let them see how I go about my job. ”

         Roethlisberger, who has won two Super Bowls with Pittsburgh, acknowledged that this is the lowest point of his career. Roethlisberger completed 36 of 51 passes for 383 yards and one touchdown but also had one interception and a fumble on Sunday. The fumble came in the final seconds after he led the Steelers from their 22 to a first-and-goal at Minnesota's 6. "I felt like we made good strides on offense," Roethlisberger said. "It's just hard to say that and to feel very good about yourself after a loss."

         With a bye week before facing the New York Jets on Oct. 13 and perhaps mainly pride left to play for, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin put players on notice that jobs could be at stake. "I have great patience," he said. "The team will work to get better. As long as I see belief and effort and we continue to improve, that's what's going to change the outcome of these games. If I don't, [they] ain't going to be a part of it, whoever it may be. It's that simple."The challenge resonated with Ben. "Yeah, I'd start with myself," he said. "We have to hold ourselves accountable." 

The Steelers Are Developing A Bad Habit

Ben Fumbles

      The Pittsburgh Steelers are getting into the habit of losing. Five turnovers, two of them returned for touchdowns, doomed the Steelers to a 40-23 loss to the Chicago Bears. The 0-3 Steelers will head to Europe and play against the 0-3 Minnesota Vikings to try to avoid becoming the franchise's first team in 45 years to lose their first four games.

       "We have to do a better job taking care of the football, period," said Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, whose team has lost nine turnovers in three games this season and the defense hasn't gotten one turnover. It is the first time the Pittsburgh Steelers have lost their first three games since 2000. It was nice to see Heath Miller back in action.

        The 0-3 start, never experienced by any of them here, had some players groping for ways to describe it. "It's a deep hole," Roethlisberger said. "It's getting deeper, but we're not going to quit." "We need to make something happen here quickly," defensive captain Ryan Clark said. "It's hard, it's frustrating, it's all those words," said another defensive captain, Brett Keisel. "This team is not going to lay down and roll over."

       Although Ben Roethlisberger completed 26 of 41 for 406 yards and Antonio Brown caught nine passes for a career-high 196 yards and two touchdown, the turnovers killed them. Tomlin has a big job ahead of him, perhaps his biggest since taking the job in 2007. Part of that is to keep his winless team focused on their jobs."I'm not going to pat them on the back for sticking together, for continuing to work or for being mentally tough," Tomlin said. "I expect them to, and that's what I just told them in there."

Steelers Win! Experts and Patriots Lose!

Almost all the so called experts had the Pittsburgh Steelers going down in defeat to Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. Not so fast my friend, you have to play the game. And that's just what the Steelers did as they went on to win 25-17. They beat Bill Belichick and the Patriots at their own game. Mike Tomlin and his coaching staff out coached the great mastermind on both sides of the football.

Offensively Ben Roethlisberger looked like Tom Brady, throwing 50 times for 365 yards. That's almost unheard of from a Steelers team. “We can be as good as we want to be,” Roethlisberger said. “When we don’t kill ourselves and stop ourselves, we can be pretty dangerous.” Tom Brady on the other hand, was held to under 200 yards passing.  “We all have to individually look in the mirror and figure out what we need to get better at,” Brady said.

The Steelers looked great on defense too. Before Lamarr Woodley got injured , he sacked Brady twice. Instead of their traditional zone defense, the Steelers played man 70% of the time. This switch confused Brady and disrupted the receiver's routes. With Troy Polamalu flying around and the rest of the defense playing up to their talent, the steelers looked good going into next week's rematch with the Baltimore Ravens. The Pittsburgh remains on top the NFL AFC North division at 6-2.

Steelers Bounce Back To 31-24 Victory

PITTSBURGH STEELERS

A throw for the ages set up the winning score, which came amid a violent collision and pileup at the goal line. That’s just the way you’d both want and expect Ravens-Steelers Part III to end, right? But neither calm nor convention was part of the equation in this AFC divisional playoff game Saturday afternoon, a game that featured bad blood, questionable calls, big plays and a familiar ending: Pittsburgh somehow finding enough magic to advance, and Baltimore lamenting offensive miscues and coming up short despite a monstrous defensive effort.

Believe it or not, a 31-24 game was basically dictated by the defenses. The Ravens scored a defensive touchdown in the first quarter and set up another with a second-quarter fumble recovery deep in Pittsburgh territory. The Steelers rallied from a 21-7 halftime deficit by returning the favor, forcing a pair of turnovers to set up relatively easy scores and holding the Ravens to minus-four yards in the third quarter.

The second of Rashard Mendenhall’s two short touchdown runs goes in the books as the game-winner, but a third-and-20 pass from Ben Roethlisberger to rookie Antonio Brown for 58 yards at the two-minute warning set it up. The Steelers’ defense didn’t get a dramatic stop at the end — T.J. Houshmandzadeh just flat dropped a fourth-down pass that ended the Ravens’ final drive — but did swing the momentum of the game in the third quarter when Ryan Clark forced a fumble and then intercepted a Joe Flacco pass, both in Ravens territory.                                                                                                         

NFL DIVISIONAL ROUND

• Steelers 31, Ravens 24
• Packers 48, Falcons 21
• Seahawks-Bears, Sun., 1:00 p.m. ET
• Jets-Patriots, Sun., 4:30 p.m. ET

“It was one heck of a football game and one heck of a comeback by the Steelers,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. “They earned it.”

A typically violent Steelers-Ravens game started with Hines Ward getting flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct on the first play from scrimmage. Terrell Suggs, who got two of his three sacks in the first half, led a Ravens front that seemed to be battering Roethlisberger on his every pass attempt. The Ravens took a 14-7 lead when Suggs hit Roethlisberger before he could throw late in the first quarter, and almost every player on the field froze, thinking the loose ball was a result of an incomplete pass. Cory Redding alertly picked it up and basically jogged 13 yards into the end zone. Five minutes into the second quarter, Ed Reed recovered a Mendenhall fumble at the Pittsburgh 16 and set up a Joe-Flacco-to-Todd-Heap touchdown pass.

Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said he told his team at halftime that “we had kicked our own butts enough.”
“Even in the midst of some adversity that we created for ourselves, and really Baltimore created, we didn’t blink,” Tomlin said. “We turned the ball over in the first half, and that’s why it was 21-7.”

Flacco was next seen on his back under a pile of black jerseys, and he spent much of the third quarter there. James Harrison sacked Flacco on the Ravens’ first play from scrimmage, the first of three sacks he had in the second half. In a game that was bully on bully from the start, the Steelers started gang-tackling and swarming the way the visitors had early, and the Heinz Field crowd responded.

With momentum on their side, the Steelers needed all of six offensive plays to tie it — two for 23 yards after Ray Rice’s first fumble of the season and four for 25 yards after the interception. Both were capped by Roethlisberger touchdown passes, a nine-yard lob to Heath Miller after a play fake that froze the defense, and an eight-yard dart to Ward to tie the game with 1:21 left in the third. "Putting Baltimore out, having them thinking about us all off season, it doesn't get any better than that,” Ward said. “They asked for us, and they kept asking for us.”

How good were the defenses? The teams combined for 11 sacks. The Steelers averaged 2.3 yards per rush; the Ravens averaged 1.9. But for as unblockable as Suggs was in the first half — and he left the Steelers’ offensive line looking as dumbfounded as referee Jeff Triplette did for most of the day — Harrison was even better in the second half. And he had help. With lynchpin end Aaron Smith out, young Ziggy Hood pitched in with five tackles and a sack. Clark broke up two passes and had two tackles for loss in addition to the turnovers. Harrison finished with seven tackles, three sacks, three tackles for loss and two pass breakups.
A third Baltimore turnover, a Flacco fumble recovered by Brett Keisel just two plays after Ward’s touchdown, set up a 35-yard Shaun Suisham field goal with 12:15 left.

Billy Cundiff tied the game at 24 with 3:54 to go on a 24-yarder as the Steelers’ defense held despite the Ravens having first-and-goal at the 8. The Ravens thought they’d scored the go-ahead touchdown at the six-minute mark on a punt return by Lardarius Webb, but a holding call on Marcus Smith as Webb got to the sideline brought it back to the Pittsburgh 29. Only getting three points gave the ball back to Roethlisberger and set the stage for the late, improbable heroics.

“We knew on offense that we put the defense in bad positions (early),” Roethlisberger said. “We can’t do that. We didn’t play good football." “(Later) we got lucky, I guess. Guys sense the urgency. We dig a little deeper.”Two shaky holding calls left the Ravens steaming mad — one on the punt return, one a defensive hold at the goal line on the Steelers’ final possession — but it was the third quarter that changed the game and, ultimately, the Steelers defense that won it and put Pittsburgh in its fourth AFC Championship Game in the past seven years.“That third quarter was the football game,” Tomlin said. “It’s signature Steeler football.”
Zac Jackson is a frequent contributor for FOX Sports Ohio.

Pittsburgh Steelers "Too Little - Too Late"

     Have you ever noticed how some teams come out of the locker room ready to play and other teams seem less prepared and unenthusiastic? Well, that was the scene in Pittsburgh on Monday Night Football. A week ago the New England Patriots got blind-sided by the Cleveland Browns. That high powered Tom Brady offense stumbled as the Browns poked holes in their defense. Well, Monday night the Patriots figured out what was wrong and put a 'W' on the sleep-walking Steelers.

     I know Pittsburgh has some key injuries to their offensive line and Hines Ward was hurt early in the game. But, they still managed to get 26 points on New England's ''D'. We know Ben's going to try and do too much and give up a couple of sacks and an interception or two. He still has a good core of receivers, even without Ward. And let's not forget how Cleveland exploited New Englands' young secondary.

     Even with the injuries to the Steelers defensive linemen, the soft coverage and lack of aggression was noticeable in the first half, especially. You give Brady the kind of time the Steelers did and you have no chance to make a play. He went virtually untouched for most of the game and Belicheck had his team ready. Mike Tomlin didn't.

     The Steelers defense had given up an average of 15.7 points a game. The Patriots almost tripled that in the 39-26 beating of the Steelers. I just hope the Pittsburgh coaches can do what the Patriots did when the Steelers play the Raiders next week. Pittsburgh remains tied atop the AFC North with the Baltimore Ravens at 6-3. New England is tied with the New York Jets form the best record in the NFL at 7-3.

The Steelers Bag The Bengals!

Although the Steelers defense had a shaky start letting the Cincinnati Bengals score an early touchdown, that would be the only touchdown they would score all night. The Pittsburgh Steelers defense allowed the Bengals to make only 6 first downs after that. They held Cincinnati to 208 total yards and a field goal in a 27-10 victory.

On the offensive side, Ben Roethlisberger had another error free game with no interceptions. Big Ben threw a touchdown to Heath Miller and ran for a TD. This is the first time this season Ben has done that. He didn't seem to be bothered much by his sore shoulder. The rest of the scoring was supplied by Jeff Reed 's 2 field goals and backup running back, Gary Russell's first NFL touchdown.

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach, Mike Tomlin said after Gary Russell's performance last Sunday that he earned his respect and he might get more carries in the future. Willie Parker had a hard time running against the Bengals defense and reinjured his knee. Tomlin decided to use Russell to get a crucial first down to keep a drive going and to punch it in from the 2 yard line for a touchdown.

The Pittsburgh Steelers are 8-3 and 1 1/2 games ahead of the Baltimore Ravens. The Baltimore Ravens play the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday. The Pittsburgh Steelers will play The New England Patriots on November 30th after 10 days of rest. steelers-fan.com