Steelers in AFC North Driver’s Seat After Today’s Win @ Baltimore
Even when the vibes are at their absolute lowest, Steelers-Ravens continues to be a matchup that delivers for the fans. Tonight, the Steelers will head back to Pittsburgh with a dub, having taken down the Ravens 27-22 in Baltimore. With today’s win, the Steelers move to 7-6, good enough for first place in the AFC North, while the Ravens fall to 6-7.
Guys, allow me to apologize. This was the first game in lord knows how long that I didn’t do a ‘pregame thoughts’ post for. Truth be told, I’m working on a longer post about some of the personnel issues that have come up in-game for us this season, and I devoted most of my energy towards that this week. That post will be out in the early portion of this coming week, and perhaps my tone will be a little less irritated in that post with today’s win in tow.
If you would’ve told me that the Ravens were gonna outgain us in rushing yards 217-34, I would’ve easily predicted a blowout win for them. Yet, here we are, having won the game in pretty convincing fashion, and that stat is real, straight from the box score. With 17 total carries for the Steelers today, it’s safe to say there was no real effort made by them to establish the run. That doesn’t necessarily make me feel good about the state of things moving forward, but we saw some much-needed life from our pass-catchers, and we got timely stops from our defense. For today, that was enough to beat a fairly healthy Ravens team that came into this season with real Super Bowl aspirations.
DK Metcalf has struggled to make an impact lately, and the general tone surrounding him from fans (myself included) hasn’t been the best. I’ve seen more than a few of yinz say that’s a bad extension that we signed him to. Today, we saw why the Steelers were willing to give him that contract. His first line in the Steelers/Ravens rivalry will go down as 7 catches for 148 yards, including the 52 yarder on the Steelers first offensive play of the game. After the game, Aaron Rodgers said that Metcalf was “on one” in practice this week, and that seemingly continued through today’s game.
Sidebar: Check out DK’s postgame interview. At one point, he’s asked about the special teams snap he played at gunner, and he kinda insinuates that he chose to enter the game himself when he saw Benny Skow (#15) dealing with a finger injury. I’m not gonna quote it, because I want yinz to just click the link and listen for yourselves. That dude loves ball, and I’m glad he’s on our squad. Shahtaht #4.
Aaron Rodgers was razor sharp today, which was not something I saw coming. He finished 23/34 for 284 yards and a TD, but it was the timely shots downfield as well as Rodgers’ rushing touchdown (as opposed to a FG - that TD came on third down) that made the difference in this game in my opinion. Third down was kinda wild in this game: the TD I just mentioned, a 31-yard bomb to Calvin Austin III on 3rd & 5, and a 38-yard TD pass to Jaylen Warren on 3rd & 4. For an offense that often struggles to sustain drives, it was nice to see that we do have the bodies on the roster to make plays like that, although we’ll see what next week looks like.
From a defensive standpoint, this game was a bit of a mixed bag. Like I said at the start, I don’t foresee us winning too many more games with a rushing yards discrepancy like 217-34. Still, timely stops from the defense helped propel us to victory - I know I’m using that word ‘timely’ a lot, but it’s true that situational football won us this game, so I press on. Coming into this game, we were missing guys like Derrick Harmon, Daniel Ekuale (IR), Kyle Dugger, Darius Slay (good riddance), and we lost some guys in-game like Malik Harrison, Patrick Queen, and Keeanu Benton. Every NFL team deals with attrition to some degree, so I try to avoid using this excuse, but the Steelers defense was stretched THIN today. With that in mind, I’m able to compartmentalize some of the ugly from this game, and just be glad about the fact that we held Lamar Jackson and the Ravens to 22 points and secured the win. I’ll probably do a film room and properly give credit where credit is due later this week, but just to quickly shahtaht some guys that I thought played out of their minds today: Patrick Queen, Brandin Echols, James Pierre, and Alex Highsmith.
Our next outing is vs. Miami in Pittsburgh.
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