PITTSBURGH: You can watch an exciting half of a football game and it can convince you that everything you’ve seen over the last month was wrong. That’s what we do as NFL observers. It is the lifeblood of our weekly column of overreactions.
Example: The Steelers are over. I mean, done. They looked finished throughout the month of December, especially when they lost to the Bengals last Monday and frankly exaggerated on Sunday afternoon when they followed the Colts 24-7 at the end of the third quarter and were unable to enter the zone. final in four consecutive attempts from inside the 2-yard line. They had no race. Ben Roethlisberger made a terrible throw after a terrible throw. Made with a capital “D” and rhyming with “E”, which means “Early playoff exit”.
And then, well, they weren’t.
After the Colts’ goal line, the Steelers’ defense hardened and forced a point, which the Steelers returned to the Colts’ 39-yard line. And on the next play, Roethlisberger found Diontae Johnson with an out-of-place Picasso for a touchdown that reduced the lead to 10 points.
A switch had turned. Suddenly, the Colts couldn’t do anything on offense and the Steelers, who had amassed just 95 yards in a dormant first half, couldn’t be stopped. Roethlisberger threw touchdown passes to Eric Ebron and JuJu Smith-Schuster in the fourth quarter and Pittsburgh won 28-24 again, securing their first AFC North title in three years.
When he finished, Smith-Schuster went to his postgame interview with us and explained that Roethlisberger had delivered a speech in the middle where he told the team they didn’t seem to be having fun. So they came out in the second half and had a lot of them.