Steelers Now
CHARLOTTE — In the Pittsburgh Steelers’ first preseason game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Steelers were not especially highly penalized, being cited six times and yielding 60 yards as a result.
One of those penalties was an illegal hands to the face penalty against second-year tackle Troy Fautanu.
In the team’s joint practice with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which was attended by NFL officials, Fautanu was also flagged for hands to the face.
The next day on the offensive line meeting board, head coach Mike Tomlin wrote the following phrase: “two is a pattern.”
If two is a pattern that requires the attention of the head football coach to address, what in the world does that make 13?
That’s how many times Tomlin’s team was flagged for violations in Thursday night’s preseason finale against the Carolina Panthers.
“It’s good to get a win,” Tomlin said after the 19-10 victory. “There was some good, but there was a lot of things you don’t like, to be quite honest with you. I thought we were highly penalized. We turned the ball over there early.”
Even worse, that all came after a second preseason game that Tomlin said was lost due to “self-inflicted wounds.”
But not all penalties are created equally. When Jalen Ramsey stuffed Carolina rookie running back Travis Etienne in the backfield, dragged him five yards further back, and then shoved him to the ground after the whistle, Tomlin can live with his defense coming out with a violent and disruptive approach that toes and occasionally crosses the line of legality.
“I’d much rather say whoa than sic ‘em, I’ll leave it at that,” Tomlin said.
On the other side of the ball, Fautanu — who has learned his lesson about being highly penalized and did not draw a flag — said there’s a difference between flags that happen when you’re trying to make a play like the five holding penalties the Steelers accumulated, and pre-snap penalties that will absolutely have Tomlin breathing fire at meetings this week.
“We’d rather have those than the stupid false start penalties — stuff you can control,” Fautanu said. “Obviously, in the game, things are moving fast. We’re just gonna go watch the tape, evaluate, and go from there.”
Fautanu said Tomlin addressed the rash of penalties once with the team already, and that he’ll likely do so again at film review, but he said the fuming head coach won’t have to rant and rave to get his point across. The players themselves are more than aware that Thursday night’s results were unacceptable.
“Obviously, no one wants to go out there and commit penalties,” Fautanu said.
Ramsey and the rest of the first-team defense only played one series against Carolina. Tomlin had announced that he only ruled out four participates for Thursday’s game, and said the rest of the starters would play, as long as Carolina put out a representative lineup.
The Panthers didn’t play ball, resting almost all...
