Pittsburgh Sports, Opinion and Politics | Just Watch the Game Blog

Maybe the backups should be the starters.

This wasn’t supposed to happen (although I did pick the Steelers to win). The Steelers were missing starters on the defensive and offensive line, at linebacker and at running back.

Could it be that the guys who replaced the starters are the guys who should remain the starters?

Did they miss Casey Hampton or James Harrison? Aaron Smith?

How about Rashard Mendenhall?

Did Max Starks play better at left tackle than everybody else who has played there this season?  What does that say about the Steelers’ decision to give up on him?

Did Ben Roethlisberger’s sore foot make him a better quarterback by forcing him to make quicker decisions?

The Steelers found out a lot about some young players today. They may have found out just as much about some old ones.

Everything new is old again.

After beating up on two terrible offenses, the Steelers defensive players were doing a lot of I-told-you-so-ing.

After losing to the Texans, James Harrison said, “We stink.”

There never was any debate about whether the Steelers defense was old.

That’s simple arithmetic.

The debate is about whether their age is going to show.

It showed yesterday in that 11-minute opening drive that the Texans went on.

Aaron Smith at 25 would have survived that much better than the 35 year-old version.

Same goes for Casey Hampton.

Ben Roethlisberger may have played one of his best games yesterday.

That depends on how many of those hits and sacks were a result of him holding on to the ball too long. He made some spectacular plays and showed that he’s as tough as anybody who ever wore a Steelers uniform, but the tape will tell how much of the debacle was his fault.

The question is : Is it good to have a quarterback who’s great at extending the play behind a bad offensive line or would it be better to have a guy who takes his three step drop and lets it rip?

Of course, if the offensive line doesn’t get better, it won’t matter because the quarterback who’s really good at keeping plays alive will be on the injured reserve list.

Bill Cowher, who became officially eligible  for the Football Hall of Fame yesterday,  was a good coach. Maybe very good, but I don’t think he was a great coach and that’s why I think he deserves to be considered for the Hall of Fame but I don’t think he should be elected.

I probably don’t have to tell you about his record. You know that he went to two Super Bowls and won one.

Unlike most people, I don’t criticize him for losing too many playoff games.

His critics point to those home losses in AFC Championship games because his teams were favored. I’ve always felt that the teams that he took into the AFC Championship game were slightly overrated.

Cowher and the Steelers benefitted from having played in divsions that were populated by expansion teams and teams that were worse than expansion teams.

The Browns/Ravens and the Oilers/Titans were organizations in turmoil and the Bengals, except for a small window a few years ago, have been the Bengals.  From the time that the Browns came back into the league as an expansion team in 1999, until the end of his Steelers career, Cowher was 24-8 against the Bengals and the Browns.

Those two teams were gifts that kept on giving.

You can only play the teams that are on your schedule and Cowher took advantage of his situation the way a good coach should.

I just don’t think he was great.

Good thing Peyton Manning has a sore neck.

The Steelers (especially Ben Roethlisberger) did everything they could to give a game away in Indianapolis.

Roethlisberger made some spectacular throws –especially the bomb to Mike Wallace — but he was doing a really good Tommy Maddox impersonation for most of the night and if he had been turning the ball over to Peyton Manning instead of someone who used to be Kerry Collins, the Steelers would have been blown out.

The Steelers defense put a lot of pressure on both Indy quarterbacks but both of them spent a lot more time thinking about where to throw it than Manning would have.

There was a lot of “a win is a win is a win” talk after the game.

The Steelers know they got away with one.

They’ll have to play better next week in Houston or they’ll be looking at a blowout.

What a difference a week makes.

http://www.nfl.com/gamecenter/2011091802/2011/REG2/ravens@titans#menu=highlights&tab=recap

The Steelers look like a Super Bowl team against a team that looks like a Big East team and the Ravens get embarrassed by a mediocre team on the road.

Now the Ravens’ are getting from the Baltimore media what the Steelers got from the Pittsburgh media last week.

Where’s Thor Tolo when you need him?

My friends in the media used to laugh at and get annoyed by Thor Tolo of KDKA Radio when he would take over Bill Cowher’s press conferences.

I never had a problem with him because I enjoyed watching him torture Cowher.

He asked some dumb questions, but he also asked a lot of tough ones that nobody else (including myself) was willing to ask.

Some of Cowher’s best soundbites came from Thor’s “dumb” questions.

Yesterday, Mike Tomlin’s press conference lasted 11 1/2 minutes — a new record for brevity.

That was 10 minutes too long.

As usual, he said nothing.

That’s a problem for the guys at Root Sports who have to fill an hour. That’s 48 1/2 minutes of analysis for 11 1/2 minutes of nothing.

You find out a lot more about a coach when things aren’t going well. Bill Cowher’s short fuse and lack of patience with the media didn’t show up until 1998.

His press conferences were always too long, even though he never said anything, either.

I stopped asking  questions in 2003. I decided I wasn’t interested in helping him show everybody what a jagoff he could be. I always held out hope that I could convince everybody in the room to get up and leave after one of his condescending answers.

That would have been great TV. Of course, if it happened now, none of the three local stations would show the video out of fear of pissing off the Steelers.

By the way, Tomlin might not have set the record if someone had asked him if he still liked it when the media asked him about the defense being old or why he kept Ben Roethlisberger in the game until the end.

Thor would have asked.

When Ben Roethlisberger is bad, he’s really bad. I guess you could say that about any quarterback but, because of his amazing ability to make something out of nothing and his willingness to try, when it’s not working for him, it means lots of ugly turnovers.

Joe Flacco should be feeling pretty good about himself tonight. You can be sure he heard all the talk about how he couldn’t beat Ben Roethlisberger.

He didn’t actually beat Roethlisberger on Sunday but he beat Dick LeBeau’s defense, which also looks really, really bad when it’s bad.

Going back to the Super Bowl, this is two games in a row that the Steelers defense has been smoked.

Troy Polamalu has a new, well deserved contract, but I keep getting the impression, based on the end of last season, the preseason and today in Baltimore, that he’s arriving about a half step too late.

It’s only the first game and it was on the road against one of the best teams in the conference, but, the Steelers’ defense looked old today and it was playing against an offensive line that was put together about a half an hour before game time.

Mike Tomlin said on Tuesday that he likes it when people talk about how old his defense is. He says it fuels them. Steelers fans had better hope that he’s still saying that a month from now.