Steelers Get Beaten (Up) By Eagles

Photo by Casey Murphy on Unsplash

It has worked against the Ravens and Lamar Jackson; against the Bills and Josh Allen; against the Bengals and Joe Burrow.

It is something for which Mike Tomlin is celebrated in national football media circles. It is one of his unique abilities.

Tomlin and the Steelers have won numerous games where they looked outclassed by the opposition by getting said opposition to roll around in the mud with them, play an ugly style of football, and ultimately lose in stunning fashion.

Winning this way takes a few ingredients, chief among them an elite kicker, a turnover-forcing defense, and some luck.

More than anything else, it also takes a willing dance partner. The Steelers got turnovers, and their elite kicker made a few kicks, but they most definitely did not have an opponent poised and ready to shoot itself in the foot.

The Philadelphia Eagles bludgeoned the Steelers. They manhandled the Steelers. They statistically dominated the Steelers. Most of all, when they did all of this for the first 30 minutes, only to find the Steelers trailing them by a mere 17-13 margin, they simply redoubled their efforts and buried Tomlin’s team even more.

There are levels of greatness in the NFL. Philadelphia is several above the Steelers, if Sunday afternoon’s festivities were any indication.

George Pickens was out, and the Steelers haven’t won in Philly since Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and on and on and on. Make all the excuses you want; Pittsburgh still played like they expected to get buried.

There was no great scheme fix to try and mask the team’s offensive shortcomings. Arthur Smith was incredibly predictable, which made Vic Fangio’s job even easier. Given the fact that Fangio is probably the best defensive coordinator in the league, it seems inadvisable to telegraph your every move for him.

Not only was the game plan lacking, the players’ execution was putrid. There were missed tackles everywhere, guys were losing their one-on-one matchups constantly, and the majority of the team looked a step – sometimes two – slow.

Some of the numbers that illustrate the degree of Philadelphia’s dominance are staggering:

-The Steelers ran just 41 offensive plays, the fewest of any team in any game this season, and the team’s fewest in a game since a 27-7 loss to Seattle in 1991, Chuck Noll’s final season.

-Pittsburgh ran just 11 offensive plays on two total possessions in the second half.

-They failed to record a first down on Philadelphia on their first six drives.

-For the first time since a season-opening loss to Dallas in 1994, the Steelers failed to gain 200 yards of offense, while allowing their opponent to gain 400 or more.

-The Steelers possessed the ball for 20:08, their second-worst mark this century, trailing only a 2003 loss to the St. Louis Rams.

-Philadelphia racked up 26 first downs to just 10 for Pittsburgh. The last time the Steelers trailed an opponent by at least 16 in that category? A 17-9 win (I can’t believe it, either) over the Oakland Raiders in 1973.

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So yes, they got their asses kicked. What’s worse, they seemed content to let Philadelphia do the kicking. Tomlin’s decision to punt the ball to the Eagles instead of try and convert a 4^th-and-7 with about 11 minutes to go was a waving of the white flag. It was a ridiculous decision in the moment, one made all the more inexplicable by his decision to have T.J. Watt still out on the field with five minutes left, the team down 27-13, and the Eagles already on the plus side of the 50.

Tomlin was asked Monday about why Watt was out there in that situation, and his terse response was, “Because we play to win.”

Except when he didn’t, five minutes prior.

Tomlin seemed to shrug the loss off more easily than most fans. He suggested that it wasn’t a time for overreaction, that it was just one game. That’s true. And it wasn’t a particularly important one for the Steelers, in the grand scheme of things. If they win Saturday against Baltimore, they will be AFC North champions, guaranteed at least one home game in the playoffs.

It was a measuring-stick game, though. Could the Steelers go into a very hostile environment, without their best playmaker, and play one of the NFL’s best teams close? The answer was a resounding no. I thought Philly was impressive in feeding the Ravens their lunch two weeks ago, but their dominance in that affair paled in comparison to this performance.

It’s still sort of difficult to comprehend the fact that Philadelphia got the ball back with a 14-point lead and 10:29 left on the clock and never let the Steelers have it again. They went 88 yards in 21 plays and could have punched it in for a touchdown had they so desired. That just doesn’t happen to Pittsburgh, doesn’t happen to a Tomlin-coached team. They get beat, sure, but they rarely get bullied.

I’m not sure what Tomlin expected out of this game. His reaction afterwards suggests to me that he had a feeling his group might be walking into a buzzsaw, but that doesn’t excuse how poorly they played. The real question, I guess, is how they plan on adjusting moving forward. They might be without Pickens and Watt against the Ravens. Will they try to scheme up advantageous situations, or will Tomlin assume that he can pull his usual Jedi mind trick on John Harbaugh and Lamar Jackson yet again, and get them to turn the game into a slop fest?

Me? I’d like to see the Steelers actually step out of their comfort zone a little bit. Do some different things; give Jaylen Warren the lion’s share of the carries at running back. If Justin Fields is healthy (a big “if,” as of this writing), give him more snaps, just to change up the look for Baltimore’s defense. Don’t just run it back the same way you did a few weeks ago and expect the same result. It might be tough to beat the Ravens if you don’t have Watt and Pickens, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

They aren’t the Eagles, after all.