Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin held a press conference immediately following the Steelers game. Here’s a breakdown of of the coach’s comments about their performance.

Opening statement

Not enough play making in the second half of the football game for us to secure victory and really is as simple as that. They made the plays when they had the ball to maintain possession of it and move. We didn’t make enough plays quickly enough to get off the field and on offense we didn’t make enough plays to possess the ball, so they dominated time of possession and were able to control the game in the second half.

We got to own that. We don’t like where we are, but we accept it. We understand that this our doing. We just got to keep working. We will do that, we won’t make excuses.

Disappointed tonight but the sun will come up tomorrow. We will look at it, assess it, make necessary adjustments and things relative to our performance and who’s available to us and get ready to roll again, that’s our story.

From an injury standpoint Vince Williams got hurt with a hamstring. Nat Berhe I think has a pec injury that’s being evaluated, he wasn’t able to return. Darrius Heyward-Bey had an ankle, so he was not able to return. Some of the other guys that didn’t participate and missed time like David DeCastro, [Marcus] Gilbert made it through fine.

Re: Slow starts to football games

We turned the ball over and we can’t do that and if we do turn it over, we got to be better at defending the short field. We turned the ball over early against Tampa and they had a 7-0 lead. We turned the ball over today and they scored. First thing is first we got to maintain possession of the ball but if we do turn it over we got to be smarter in the sudden change situations that we’ve been.

How do you explain the strong second quarters and then the scoreless 2^nd halves in the past two weeks?

I am not looking for patterns, I am just trying to win a game in this stadium in which we just stepped out of, so I gave the description of why we were not able to be successful today. They maintained possession of the ball and we didn’t.

We are you struggling to run the football?

That’s a good question. We were not able to find enough traction tonight. We didn’t run it a lot and I’d imagine the more we run it the more traction we will find but again as the game unfolded they were controlling it by possession and winning possession downs and we weren’t, so it tends to look like that when the game is being controlled in that way.

Re: Bringing in Ryan Switzer for James Conner

That’s just personnel packages that we worked within. He’s a valuable component of our offense and has been a nice contributor.

At what start do you start worrying about patterns and worry about these things happening on a continual basis?

Well I am just trying to win the games as we sit here today. We have some things we need to improve on and we’re continually working to do so.

Did you feel you defense was fatigued when the Ravens went up 23-14?

I didn’t. I didn’t think we made enough plays, but I didn’t think that fatigue was an element of it.

Transcript provided by the Pittsburgh Steelers.