Steelers Roll Around in the Slop, Beat Ravens Yet Again

If we’re going to start off on the right foot, I might as well be truthful.

I thought this Steelers-Ravens game would be Lamar Jackson’s breakout performance against the one opponent that has befuddled him. I thought he would show out, the Ravens’ offense would triumph over Mike Tomlin’s defense, and Baltimore would walk out of Acrisure Stadium with an important AFC North win.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Instead of bearing witness to the rare shootout between two teams whose rivalry has been defined primarily by defense and violence, we got, well, more defense and violence. And in both cases, the Steelers got the upper hand.

Had you told me beforehand that the Steelers would win this game without scoring a single touchdown, I would have laughed at you. When asked the same question after the game, Tomlin’s response was, “Steelers-Ravens.”

He knows what this rivalry is all about. (It isn’t scoring: This was the eighth consecutive game in which neither team scored more than 20 points.)

Evidently, he also knows what stopping Lamar Jackson is all about. Tomlin might have the utmost respect for the Ravens’ signal-caller, so much so that he refers to him as Mr. Jackson – “Mister” being the highest compliment for an opposing player in the Tomlin lexicon – but his teams don’t show him much between the lines. Other than a final drive that saw him make a few big plays, Jackson had a miserable day, finishing 16-of-33 for 207 yards, 1 touchdown and 1 interception.

Jackson has started 88 regular-season games in his NFL career. He’s completed under 50 percent of his passes and thrown at least one interception in two of them. Both are against the Steelers. Yesterday joined a 28-24 Steelers win on November 1, 2020 in the more ignominious section of his bio.

Last year, the Ravens came to Pittsburgh and lost in large part because their receivers dropped an astonishing number of passes – seven, by Pro Football Focus’ charting – which allowed the Steelers to eventually win a game they should have lost by two touchdowns. Incidentally, PFF gave Jackson his second-best grade of the year for that game. In other words, they were saying, it wasn’t his fault.

It was on Sunday. Zay Flowers had a drop, and a bad one, but Jackson eventually found him for a touchdown a few plays later. Otherwise, the man who came into the game as the presumptive MVP frontrunner couldn’t get himself going.

The Steelers’ pass rush consistently frustrated Jackson, rarely giving him lanes to run, and routinely throwing off his timing. He was off-kilter right from the get-go, and that dynamic never went away. He missed wide-open throws on multiple occasions, one of which came on a third-down play where it appeared he had about 25 yards of open space if he wanted to take off and run.

In other words, he wasn’t Lamar Jackson. Because the Steelers made him that way.

After the game, the Steelers, to a man, said that the key to stopping Jackson was playing hard and playing together. Doing their jobs and staying within themselves, things of that nature. I assure you, if it was that easy, he wouldn’t have two MVP awards. I also assure you that it’s much more nuanced and complicated than that.

In addition to the rush lanes consistently being clogged, the Steelers applied pressure from all angles, and rarely let Jackson throw from a comfortable platform. The combination of the pass rush, missing some of those available throws and repeatedly being forced to punt took their toll. Jackson usually dictates terms to the opposition. This time, he seemed like a guy without any answers to the questions the Steelers were asking.

When Jackson wasn’t misfiring, the Steelers were making plays all over the field. Nick Herbig punched the ball loose from Derrick Henry on the second play of the game, giving Henry his first fumble in over 500 carries. Patrick Queen ripped the ball out of Isaiah Likely’s hands and recovered it with under a minute to go in the first half, directly leading to three points and a 9-7 advantage. Rookie linebacker Payton Wilson made perhaps the play of the game, picking off Jackson in preposterous fashion, as he ripped the ball away from Justice Hill while the two were tumbling to the ground. It led to Chris Boswell’s sixth-and-final field goal of the day, which proved to be the winning points.

There are many individual storylines to pluck from this game – Jackson’s continued failures against the Steelers, Queen’s big revenge game, Russell Wilson finally looking like Bad Russ for a change, Diontae Johnson putting up a goose egg in his revenge bout, Justin Tucker complaining about the field surface affecting him (I guess he didn’t see Boswell go 6-for-6, including 3-of-3 from 50+ yards) – that it’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure for narratives.

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I’ll stick with this one, the one that permeates all of the smaller storylines: Tomlin and the Steelers once again did a Jedi mind trick on John Harbaugh and the Ravens, dragging them into deep water, getting them to play their preferred game, and then simply outlasting them at the end. This year’s Ravens are a sports car, and while the Steelers with Wilson have been a more high-powered offensive outfit, they’ve always been comfortable rolling around in the mud and winning with defense under Tomlin’s guidance.

How comfortable? Consider these two stats: In Tomlin’s tenure, the Steelers are 5-10 when they don’t score a touchdown. That’s a .333 winning percentage. The rest of the NFL in that same time frame? 39-544-1, or a .068 winning percentage. Tomlin wins games like Sunday’s at five times the rate of the rest of the league. They’re 2-0 in such situations this year, while the rest of the league is 2-19. Tomlin’s teams also play more one-score games than anyone, and they win 61 percent of them, also the best mark in the NFL during his tenure. They’re 5-2 in that department this year.

There will be time to discuss whether or not Wilson’s inability to exploit the league’s worst pass defense is a sign of a long-range problem, or whether or not the Steelers should use Justin Fields more often, and actually run something resembling a two-quarterback attack – Fields’ usage on Sunday was perfect, and had he not slid early, the game would have ended on a brilliant quarterback power run and not a white-knuckle conversion from Najee Harris.

For right now, though, admiring a win is enough. Beating a team as good as the Ravens, and holding them to season lows in points and yards is cause for celebration, full stop. They’re still absolutely a Super Bowl contender.

Thing of it is, they don’t look like one when they play the Steelers. And guess what? That, coupled with an 8-2 record, makes the Steelers one, too.

Makes them “what,” you ask?

A Super Bowl contender, of course.