PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) - Ben Roethlisberger tried to calm the masses on Wednesday.
He said things like, “it’s not the end of the world,” and “take a deep breath” and “we have time” to figure things out offensively before the playoffs.
One of those things that the Steelers have not figured out for several weeks now is how to run the football effectively. The Fan Morning Show talked to longtime NFL writer, now NBC Sports columnist Peter King about whether the Steelers can actually fix what’s wrong with the running game over the next three weeks before the postseason.
“I mean, I don’t want to say it’s impossible but...”
Oh boy. Not a good start to the answer.
“If this was two or three weeks, I would say yeah. I heard this on one of the shows over the weekend that Mike Tomlin had them in pads last Friday which sounds like a really cool idea and all of that.
But unfortunate part of that is that this has been seven weeks. This is not two weeks, it’s two months that they’ve been averaging 57 yards per game. For the Cleveland Browns, that’s a quarter. You know? Or for the Ravens, that’s a quarter.
At this point, I just think the guys who you put out there on offense have to play better. You’ve got to be a little bit better in the running game, you’ve got to be a lot better in the possession passing game. Diontae Johnson is the biggest culprit there. They’ve got to find some way to fix him or he’s not going to be playing very much.”
What about the quarterback? What does he think about how Ben Roethliseberger looks to be able to get those passes to the receivers on possession downs?
“You know, I just think he looks a little slow. He never has been a guy who’s very quick there. But he’s still got the arm. His arm, to me, looks fine.
I was saying to somebody the other day, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this if they didn’t have 13 or 14 drops the last three weeks. We would have been talking about the running game, that’s for darn sure.
But I don’t know that we’d be talking about Ben in that way.
He just looks, I don’t want to say old because that’s a cliché, but he just looks like it’s kind of taken a toll on him. Maybe what’s taken a toll on him is feeling like he’s got to carry everything about this offense right now because he’s not getting any help.”
Peter also questioned whether the Steelers would be able to hang with the Chiefs and Bills in the playoffs and wondered if we start to see the impact of Bud Dupree missing from the Steelers defense down the stretch of the season.