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Steelers vs Eagles: Quick Hitters
By Dagger | September 21, 2008
*Awful day for the OL. We’ll be dedicating the entire week (frames, analysis/grades, video, breakdowns) to the Offensive Line since nothing else in this game is worth taking another look at. Dallas gave up 0 sacks last week vs Philly. Hmmm…..
*Maybe the worst game of Bruce Arians’ Pittsburgh career. Play-calling was real, real bad. A quote from Albert Einstein…..”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
*OL, Coaching (OL coach, Head Coach, OCoord), and playcalling need to be discussed heavily this week.
*This was most likely the most boring Steeler game I have watched in the last 10 years.
*The Steelers have a number of offensive weapons that are not being properly utilized. Sure the OL was terrible, but there are other ways to get the ball into the hands of your playmakers.
*I don’t want to hear “hey, we looked that bad but we were in the game to the end!” Well, lets not forget that one of the best RBs in the entire NFL…..and the MVP of the Eagles offense was not on the field today. The Eagles ENTIRE OFFENSE is filtered through Westbrook. You could argue that no other team in the league relies on one player like they do with Westbrook. If he plays the entire game today there is no way this game is close in the 4th QTR. The Steelers deserved to get beatdown about 3x worse than the final score indicated.
*Last week, the Cowboys attempted to neutralize the Eagles blitz with some quick dumps to TEs and RBs. Last week the ‘Boys hit a RB or TE 14 times. The week before, the Rams his their RB/TE 8 times. Today the Steelers threw one ball to a RB (Mendenhall) and 4 passes to Heath Miller….and did you notice that whenever they threw to Heath it worked?
*Any other team in the NFL employ their Power Back and their FullBack as the deep men on the Kickoff Return team?
*I’ll pay somebody to re-watch and grade/break down this game for me.
Topics: Sports, Steelers | 13 Comments »
September 21st, 2008 at 9:26 pm
That’s an apt Einstein quote. If you exclude the first and last drives, when the Eagles weren’t running the TOP SECRET all out blitz every single play, we gained 63 yards on 10 drives, with a 6.3 ypd average.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 am
Arians is an idiot mike martz wannabe. Its all deep routes that Ben can’t hit cause he never has the time. He has all these fancy scheme but cannot get his offense to execute the basics, like blocking.
What was with Hartwig? I saw him let in rushers right in over and over.
Why were all our receivers running routes right into each other and not stretching their d? Thats some crap playcalling. Have we heard of the screen? or reverse? double reverse? Blocking?
Zeriling or whatever our oline coach is called is an idiot. Him and Arians both deserve the boot, the sooner the better.
Holmes picked a great time to put in his worst game EVER. Drop enough?
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:23 am
Worst. Coached. Game. Ever.
And why exactly did we draft a 230 battering-ram RB if we’re not going to use him to pound a ‘D’ like that when it’s completely sealing off the edge from Willie?
You can definitely keep your gold stars in the drawer when you grade the O-line for this one.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:27 am
You and I had the same exact title to our blog post. Great minds, sometimes, do think alike.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I think the toughest part of this debacle is it’s starting to solidify the picture of Mike Tomlin: all talk and no action. I had high hopes when first came on board and talked about not being constrained by one philosophy… If we needed to throw the ball 50 times one week and run it 50 times the next week, then we’d do it. But it’s pretty apparent now there’s no deep game planning going, no targeting the weakness of the opposition, no adjustments on the fly. Heck, he’s screwed up the simple decision to go for 3 at the end of the ball game.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Josh-
HA. i saw that. i think it’s the perfect headline for this game.
SteelMass-
I don’t want to take too much out of 1 football game but I think I agree with all of your points. I don’t think Tomlin has showed us anything in terms of Xs and Os. He uses his “catchphrases” and sayings but I don’t know about him as a HC yet. We will have to wait and see. Not sure if the lack of adjustments and game-planning is only on the coordinators or if Tomlin deserves a good amount of blame as well. Arians is up and down. LeBeau is always on the ball.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Tomlin did not get the job because of X’s and O’s. He got it because he has a winning personality and people like him. On top of that, he is a defensive coach. This makes him uber-reliant on his OC. Unlike his mentor, Dungy, he does not look to have found his Tom Moore, the OC who can handle the job 100%.
I wonder what he was yelling at Arians as he took off his headset at the end of the game…
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
The problem with hiring a defensive guy as HC is that he’ll have to depend on a decent OC, which we don’t have. The main problem I have with Tomlin is that he didn’t fire Arians after last year. He could have hired a guy like Cam Cameron who had a similar skill set in SD. I was hopeful after week 1 that Arians had improved or something, but he didn’t. If he’s still around next year, I’ll start calling for Tomlin’s head.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Nice read Dagger.
That game was painful to watch
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Yes, the offensive line was terrible. Yes, Tomlin and Arians made no use of slants or screens or anything else to get the ball out of Ben’s hands quickly. Yes, they didn’t give Ben additional blockers.
But we have to look at Roethlisberger a little, don’t we? He thinks he can make a play when guys are hanging off of him or when he is flushed out of the pocket. As a result, he NEVER gets rid of the ball. He could have thrown the ball away on a number of occasions but hesitated or looked for second/third options, which led to sacks.
Late in the game he threw the ball out of bounds under pressure and I remember thinking it was the first time all game he had done it. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’m thinking there’s a reason, other than the O-line, that Ben gets sacked 1,000 times a season.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Its tough to blame Ben when the Steelers are breaking the huddle with 10-12 seconds on the play clock…Eliminates a few things Ben can do…You know like calling an audible or varying the snap count?
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:25 am
Roethlisberger passed or had a man on him within 3 seconds on 31 of 37 pass plays.
No, I don’t think we have to look his way.
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:30 am
NickC said: I wonder what [tomlin] was yelling at Arians as he took off his headset at the end of the game…
i think that was the special teams coach, ligashesky. i figured it was tomlin explaining why he decided at the end to go for a TD instead of FG, which i actually think was the right decision.