The Pittsburgh Steelers and Buffalo Bills have been playing every year long enough at this point so you can be aware of the shared baggage of their two head coaches. Both Mike Tomlin and Sean McDermott played William & Mary on the same team in turn. They now preside over a couple of division winners.
The McDermott team has won the last two years, but not this time. The Steelers beat Buffalo 23-6 in the second half of yesterday’s game to take the win after a 10-0 comeback in the first half. In Buffalo. You can’t let that happen if you’re the Bills head coach.
“You have to stay humble and hungry every week. It’s a league from week to week, and it gives credit where it has to be paid. ” McDermott said of the loss after the game. “Mike Tomlin and his team came in here, they beat us and they beat us, and I give them credit. But we have to learn from that as coaches, as players and prepare to start ”.
The game opened with the Bills getting a 75-yard partial at the start of the play, which resulted in a field goal for the home team. Most of the rest of the first half was dominated by the defense, before Buffalo was able to enter the end zone at the end of the second quarter in a 13- and 96-yard game.
But from then on it was Pittsburgh, more or less. They owned the ball five times, offensively, and scored four times, with the final possession being two victory-forming actions. They also got a special team touchdown on a blocked kick courtesy of Mile Killebrew and Ulysees Gilbert III.
More than that, the coaches used confrontations and personnel in their favor. They had different looks and tasks. They placed the receivers in brackets throughout the match, which gave Josh Allen trouble when the passing race even gave him time to sit in his pocket.
There’s still something missing in the execution, and a lot of that just has to do with these young players catching up: there are four new starters just on offense and several new faces on defense.
But schematically, it was as good as the Steelers have seen in a while. Not everything has worked, not everything will work, but they are demonstrating a wider range of possibilities than their norm.
Many of them have probably been tied up out of necessity and may not be permanent. But a good workout is like playing chess; it’s just a matter of placing the pieces in the right places for them to win. Tomlin and his staff did this yesterday.