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Pittsburgh Steelers
For the second consecutive week, Mike Tomlin’s crew was in a street fight. For the second consecutive week, when it mattered most and gloves were dropped, it was Pittsburgh swinging just a little harder.
Last week, it was Minkah Fitzpatrick and Damontae Kazee stoning Zach Ertz inches short of the sticks on fourth down to close out the Washington Commanders. This week, it was a crew of players along the Pittsburgh front winning their one-on-ones, and having a pretty good idea of what might be coming, in stopping a late two-point conversion attempt by the Baltimore Ravens that would have tied it.
There were razor-thin margins in both games. The Steelers took them, as they see it, mostly because they have a bunch of guys fighting for them with a boatload of experience.
“We were just calm throughout, with the rollercoaster,” 14-year vet Cam Heyward told me. “You just learn to stay even keel. No matter if it was good or bad, you got to weather the storm, rally around each other—and understand we can still make a play. Going into that drive, we knew they were going to have to go for a two-point conversion. They scored a little quicker than we would have liked. But we felt confident in our group getting it done.”
And, as Heyward said, that confidence wasn’t shaken, even after the presumptive favorite for NFL MVP, Lamar Jackson, led the Ravens on a nine-play, 69-yard drive that ended in a 16-yard touchdown strike to Zay Flowers at the 1:06 mark of the fourth quarter. There was, indeed, another down to play, and the Steelers were ready for it.
Or, at least, they were after getting a first look at what Baltimore had coming.
“We were in a nickel, and I think they were a little confused up front with what they wanted to do—they had gone to a tackle over formation,” Heyward says. “We called a timeout. They got out of it. We went to our ’Okie’ front, which is our base front. We could see they had a tight end on the ball, two receivers [alongside him]. We felt like there was going to be some type of rollout, some type of way. Just because it was a condensed formation [to our left].
“You start playing into that. We felt like it was going to be guided out that way.”
So at the snap, outside linebacker Nick Herbig burst inside receiver Nelson Agholor, and as Agholor flailed to block him, Herbig got in the way of two pulling linemen, who couldn’t get out to the edge fast enough to lead block for Jackson as a result. That left Jackson on the perimeter all alone with corner Joey Porter Jr., who held outside contain and rode Jackson to the sideline, forcing Jackson to throw the ball back to the field in desperation, hoping someone could do something with it. At that point, no one could, and that ended it.
“Nick did a pretty good job of holding it up. Joey Porter Jr falling over the top was great, and we stopped it,” Heyward says. “We were able to force them into a pretty dire situation.”
That, really, was a microcosm of how the game was played. In a rivalry game featuring two physical teams, one offense-heavy (Ravens) and the other defense-heavy (Steelers), it was defense that won the day. And from the very start.
On the second play from scrimmage, Herbig chased down Derrick Henry from behind and forced a fumble that gave the Steelers their first possession on the fringe of field goal range. The Steelers got two three-and-outs right after that, only allowing the Ravens their initial first down on the second-to-last play of the first quarter.
Of course, the plan was more complex than . The key, as Pittsburgh saw it, was creating turnovers—the Steelers thought there’d be opportunities for those, and they came with Herbig’s punch out and rookie linebacker Payton Wilson’s spectacular, pivotal fourth-quarter interception—and keeping Jackson from creating with his legs, in both the run game and the pass game.
“I know we let some runs out, where he got [away],” Heyward says. “I thought we did a good job of having multiple guys, whether it was Minkah, Patrick Queen, get to the ball. There were moments where it was bend, don’t break, where we might surrender some yards, and having to deal with that monster in Derrick Henry was a big reason. But the thing that really stuck out more than anything was the turnovers.
“The turnovers were the key to the game and allowed us to control the game.”
And they gave the Steelers the margin for error they needed to win the game when it mattered most, on the two-pointer and then the following possession, where Justin Fields came into the game to help chew up what was left of the clock in relief of Russell Wilson, who is now 4–0 as starter.
After the fourth of those wins, Heyward called Pittsburgh’s quarterback room “one of the top quarterback rooms” in the NFL.
Is that true? Maybe. Maybe not.
But it’s been good enough to get this team that really seems to know what it wants to be to 8–2, and good enough to vanquish a loaded rival in mid-November. Which means it’s fair to think it might just be good enough to accomplish a whole lot more for a franchise with the highest of standards, one that hasn’t won so much as a single playoff game in eight years.
“We’re very experienced. We’ve seen the highs. We’ve seen the lows. Everybody is better because of those,” Heyward says. “When we get into those tight situations, using Mike T’s words, we don’t blink. One thing that’s been working in our advantage, we have an offense that can sustain drives. I know they didn’t get touchdowns, but they moved the ball with success. Having a good defense that gets off the field, offense that stays on the field, when we create that, it allows us to stay fresh. It allows us to perform in the fourth."
No coincidence, then, that doing just that has become the Steelers’ specialty.
