PITTSBURGH – You can watch an exciting half of a football game and it can convince you that everything you have seen in the last month was wrong. This is what we do as NFL observers. It is the lifeblood of our weekly overreaction column.
Example: The Steelers were done. I mean, done. They looked all December, especially when they lost to the Bengals last Monday and downright exaggerated on Sunday afternoon when they left the Colts 24-7 late in the third quarter and failed to get into the end zone on four consecutive tries from the inside. the 2 yard line. They did not have a running competition. Ben Roethlisberger made a terrible pitch after a terrible pitch. Done with a capital “D” that rhymes with “E” which stands for “Early playoff exit.”
And then, just like that, they weren’t.
After the Colts goal-line stand, the Steelers ‘defense stiffened and forced a kick, which returned the Steelers to the Colts’ 39-yard line. And in the next game, Roethlisberger Diontae Johnson found Picasso out of nowhere from a pitch for a touchdown that reduced the lead to 10 points.
A switch had been flipped. Suddenly, the Colts couldn’t do anything about the attack, and the Steelers, who had taken off just 100 yards in a sleepy first half, couldn’t be stopped. Roethlisberger threw touchdown passes to Eric Ebron in the fourth quarter and JuJu Smith-Schuster and Pittsburgh came back to win 28-24, earning his first AFC North title in three years.
When it was over, Smith-Schuster stopped by for his post-game interview with us and explained that Roethlisberger had given a halftime speech telling the team that it didn’t look like they were having a good time. So they went out in the second half and had a ton of it.