Good, Bad, & Ugly: 2015-8 – Cincinnati Bengals

For once, I’m at a loss of words for how to start this column. Honestly, I felt cheated out of Sunday’s game, as I’m sure most fans and even the players did.

First, the Steelers must have a curse against them, losing a multitude of players to injury. It’s hard to win when you are playing so many of your second-team players, and those second-teamers are replaced by replacements. It’s a wonder there’s room on the sidelines with all of the guys who have been in street clothes due to injuries and suspensions.

The latest to suffer is Le’Veon Bell, who injured his knee in the game, and though unconfirmed, may be lost for the season. He adds to a long list of players who have been sidelined for one reason or another in 2015. All of those “weapons” (Brown, Bryant, Bell, and Ben) were on the field for a measly quarter of football this season, the first quarter of Sunday’s game.

Ironically, it would be the only quarter with a Steelers touchdown, as the offense would struggle to find the endzone throughout the game. Equally struggling, was the flow of the game, hampered by 10 penalites on each of the teams. The referees made the game very difficult to watch, with long delays; some of those penalties were the right call, while others felt like ticky-tack fouls.

Among the game-altering decisions was a false start flag on Cincinnati, which nullified a field goal: the retry would be blocked by Cam Heyward and set forth a flag fiesta from the officials. The 2nd play after the turnover, Matt Spaeth was flagged for holding. DeAngelo Williams then broke a 55-yard dash down to the Cincinnati 25.

Then more flags… Heath Miller was called for a hold on first down, which didn’t look like a hold at all. The very next play, Big Ben threw a deep ball to Bryant, who was held while attempting to make the catch. A zebra threw a flag, but the crew discussed and somehow decided it was not a penalty. (The play would have likely resulted in a game-deciding touchdown.)

The ensuing play would see Ben get sacked (while Marcus Gilbert was also called for a holding penalty, which was declined) and found themselves out of field goal range.

I’m not sure if the football gods were against Pittsburgh, if the game was fixed, if it were bad luck, lack of concentration by the game officials, or what, but everything certainly appeared to go against the Steelers in the last quarter of football.

I don’t want to place all of the blame on officiating, as both teams did enough to deserve being put in a situation where they should not have to rely on a call made or not, for or against. And that was definitely the case for Ben Roethlisberger, who threw 3 interceptions in his return. As I had written last week about Landry Jones, it doesn’t always matter who is at QB: committing 3 turnovers and self-defeating penalties will cost you the game against a 1-win team or an undefeated team.

It appears the defense at least got the memo from the Chiefs loss, creating turnovers, getting to Andy Dalton and limiting the Bengals to no third down conversions in the first half (and only 3 the entire game.) In some alternate universe, the Steelers defense continues to rise to the occasion while missing injured players, while the offense, which was once deemed as “explosive” can’t move the ball no matter which QB is under center.

The defense continues to grow and puts a glimmer of hope that the Steelers can recover and still make the postseason with a 4-4 record. Since they have held 3 of the league’s top scoring offenses to their lowest season totals when playing Pittsburgh, we would assume that the offense has to uphold it’s end of the bargain and start to match fire with fire.

Finally, blame has to go on Mike Tomlin for wasting an estimated 38 seconds of time before the two minute warning, but not using 1 of his 3 remaining timeouts. In his postgame press conference, Coach Tomlin said he preferred having the timeout for later, however, I think that’s a bad time management issue, in which the Steelers offense could’ve had, potentially, enough time to run 1-2 more plays at the end of regulation: perhaps a game-winning play.

That was the ugliest of an ugly game.