Smoot Lays The Smack Down (Redskins vs Steelers)

[mheisig]

As much as this game sucks I think I'm really just chalking it up to Pittsburgh being really good. Their defense is nasty, physical and tough. Their offense isn't spectacular, but they get the job done and clearly have depth at QB.

Sure, we screwed up and had our missed opportunities. On offense I think a lot of that is because of who we were playing. JC was under immense pressure all night from a blitz crazy defense that has gotten to a lot of other QBs.

I think most of the problems last night center around the offense not being able to get it together, but is that surprising?


Consider:

• Pittsburgh allows an average of about 230 yds per game - we got something like 221.
• They allow an average of of 164 passing yards, we got a little over 200.
• They allow an average of 64 rushing yards per game, we got almost exactly that.
• They lead the league in sacks, we got sacked all night long.
• They average about 1 INT per game, they picked us off twice.

If you look at the Pittsburgh defense throughout the first half of the season, they did to us almost exactly what they've done on average to everyone else. Is that shocking? Did we really expect to have the #1 ranked defense come in here and we'd put up 35 on them and air it out all night? Did anyone think CP was going to rack up another 150 on these guys?

On the other side of the ball our defense really did quite well:

Consider:

• We held them to 179 yards passing and 1 INT.
• Held Parker to 70 yards on 21 carries (3.3 YPC)
• Racked up 5 sacks (really spectacular for us given our complete lack of sacks).

If you handed anyone the defensive stats I just listed the universal response would be "sounds like the defense played a really good game."

The difference in this game I don't think was that we just killed ourselves or we're horrible or the season is over or the Redskins suck - we just got outplayed by a really good team. They put up the points when it really mattered like a good team should - we're just not THAT good team right now.

Moral of the story: this wasn't like losing to the Rams.