Steelers Now
PITTSBURGH — There’s no two ways of saying it, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ secondary got its butt kicked in Thursday night’s 33-31 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals.
Actually, there is another way to say it: to not say it at all. That’s the tact Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin took on Tuesday, as he had his weekly press conference to wrap up the loss to the Bengals and look ahead to the team’s Week 8 Sunday Night Football matchup with the Green Bay Packers.
Tomlin devoted an extensive chunk of time in his opening monologue to why he felt his team was upset by the Bengals.
He talked at length about his team’s inability to stop the run, and that was certainly true. Bengals running back Chase Brown torched the Steelers for 108 yards on 11 carries, and Cincinnati totaled 142 yards on the ground after averaging less than 60 per game over its first six contests.
“We’ve got to stop the run more effectively,” Tomlin said. “We feel like that’s a building block for us to play good defense, to get offenses in more one-dimensional passing circumstances, to get people in more advantageous possession-down circumstances for us. Our inability to stop the run, I think created that, and that was an issue for us. … It created an environment where we weren’t controlling the game from that perspective.”
Tomlin also talked extensively about the team’s minus-2 turnover margin, with two turnovers on offense and no takeaways on defense for the second straight game. The defense did not get a turnover for the second straight game — and for a unit that is built to do that very thing, facing a rookie in his second start and a 40-year-old without mobility at quarterback, their inability to do so is very troubling. But the way he approached his statement suggested that he took more issue with the offense’s two turnovers than his defense’s lack of them.
“We turned the ball over twice, and really, that hadn’t been us,” he said. “We’ve been really good at protecting and preserving the ball. But if you get a couple of turnovers and you’re not stopping the run, that’s just not a good posture to play from. We certainly didn’t take the ball away. So to be minus-2 in a hostile place, while not stopping the run, is kind of a catalyst for losing.”
Finally, Tomlin highlighted his team once again being highly penalized. The Steelers were dinged for seven fouls, totaling 59 yards, against the Bengals. They also had been highly penalized the previous week, so it makes sense for that to be a sticking point for the head coach.
But once again, he approached the issue from the point of view of looking at the offense first and foremost.
“I thought the false start (on Mason McCormick) on 4th and 1, when we were in the red area, was a four-point-like penalty. In games like that, man, you just can’t afford to have them....
