PITTSBURGH – You can watch one exciting half of one football game and it can convince you that everything you saw last month was wrong. This is what we as NFL observers do. This is the lifeblood of our weekly column with overreactions.
Example: the Steelers were done. I mean, done. They look finished throughout December, especially when they lost to the Bengals last Monday and completely overdo it on Sunday afternoon when they chased the Colts 24-7 late in the third quarter and were unable to get on four straight tries from inside the final zone. the 2-yard line. They had no running game. Ben Roethlisberger made an awful throw after an awful throw. Done with a capital letter “D” and it rhymes with “E” and it stands for “Early playoff game.”
And then, just like that, they were not.
After the Colts’ goal line, the Steelers’ defense defended and forced a point, bringing the Steelers back to the Colts’ 39-year-old line. And in the next game, Roethlisberger found Diontae Johnson with a Picasso-out-of-the-neck throw for an attack that reduced the lead to 10 points.
A switch turned on. Suddenly, the Colts could do nothing offensive and the Steelers, who scored just 95 yards in a sleepy first half, could not be stopped. Roethlisberger passed in the fourth quarter through Eric Ebron and JuJu Smith-Schuster and Pittsburgh won again 28-24, winning the first AFC North title in three years.
When it was over, Smith-Schuster came to us for his interview and explained that Roethlisberger was giving a rest time speech in which he told the team they did not seem to be having fun. So they went out in the second half and had a bunch of them.