Steelers Now
Acrisure Stadium has the reputation of being one of the toughest places for visiting kicker to kick in the NFL, and it certainly showed part of its arsenal on Sunday in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ last-second 26-24 win over the Baltimore Ravens.
The Steelers’ home field takes a multi-pronged assault on opposing specialists like Ravens rookie Tyler Loop, who missed what would have been a game-winning 44-yard field goal as time expired last Sunday.
First and foremost is Pittsburgh’s weather. There are only 11 NFL teams with a stadium north of 40 degrees latitude. Two of them — Detroit and Minnesota — play in domes.
Of the remaining eight northern NFL teams, Buffalo, New England, Seattle and the New York Jets and Giants all play on turf, leaving Pittsburgh along with Green Bay, Chicago and Cleveland as the last places where NFL kickers are on grass during winter conditions in the north.
The other three stadiums are fully enclosed bowls, while the three-sided Acrisure Stadium lets wind in its open south end zone, creating unpredictable swirls and eddies for kickers to deal with.
And then there’s Steelers Nation, the team’s rabid fanbase which can jack up the pressure for an opposing kicker, something several Steelers said they believed was the cause of Loop’s miss last week.
“I turned around and just looked at the crowd,” wide receiver Calvin Austin III said. “The crowd got crazy, so I knew. The crowd was hype the whole game, so I knew they (were) gonna miss.”
That was the first time in the stadium for Loop, a Lucas, Texas native who kicked collegiately at Arizona before being drafted by the Ravens this spring.
This week, the Steelers’ opponent is no rookie. Ka’imi Fairbairn, the Texans’ 31-year-old mainstay, is in his ninth NFL season, and he has been very reliable. He has a carer 87.6% success rate and finished first in the league this season in field goals made (44) and attempted (48).
But it will still be a new experience for him at Acrisure Stadium this week. Fairbairn, who is Hawaiian, has kicked in Pittsburgh just once in career in the regular season, and that game was played on a 79-degree day in September 2020. Even then, he didn’t even attempt a field goal, kicking only three extra points.
“We’re definitely the dome team, right?” Texans special teams coach Frank Ross said this week, in video posted by Aaron Wilson of KPRC-TV in Houston. “Every week, it’s going to be minor adjustments when you get out there. … Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, these are hard places for specialists to play. For us, we’ve got to be at our best.”
Fairbairn has only played four games in his career with a kickoff temperature at or below freezing, and while the sample size is small, he’s been fairly good, missing just one kick out of seven for an 85.7% success rate, just slightly below his usual mark, and actually above his overall outdoor mark of 84.3%. The...
