INDIANAPOLIS — Early in the second half Sunday at Lucas Oil Stadium, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Justin Fields felt the blitzing Indianapolis Colts defenders coming free off the edge and retreated.
… and retreated.
… and retreated.
The 6-foot-3, 227-pound passer backpedaled almost 20 yards, spun around, tripped and (somehow) fumbled — a comedy of errors that first took the Steelers out of field goal range and then handed the ball back to the Colts.
This play did not work out well for Justin Fields pic.twitter.com/oGtjjqGYbv
— NFL on CBS 🏈 (@NFLonCBS) September 29, 2024
Long after the 27-24 loss to the short-handed Colts, Fields was still beating himself up for the miscue when he stepped to the podium for his postgame news conference.
“I gotta get the ball out. I was hot. Gotta get the ball out to the flat … to Najee (Harris), let him catch and run,” Fields said. “At worst, we kick a field goal, and at the end of the game, we’re tied 27-27 with the chance to go down and win the game with a field goal.”
When a team loses by just three points, every mistake — big or small — is magnified. Sunday, in a loss that revealed many of the Steelers’ warts and forced you to Google “How old is Joe Flacco?” there were almost too many to count.
There was George Pickens’ fumble inside the 10-yard line. That’s three points minimum, maybe seven off the board. There was offensive lineman Spencer Anderson’s late hit that took the Steelers out of field goal range in the first quarter. Three more points right there. There was coach Mike Tomlin’s decision on the Steelers’ second offensive possession of the game to go for it on fourth-and-inches from Pittsburgh’s own 39-yard-line — and then the failure to convert it. That backfired and basically handed the Colts a field goal. Three more points.
“First and foremost, you can tip your caps to the other team,” Fields said. “But I think at the end of the end of the day, we beat ourselves.”
If any one of these plays had gone the other way, the Steelers might be celebrating Fields’ resiliency and a still unblemished record. Instead, they were left wondering what if.
“The standard is the standard with the Pittsburgh Steelers,” safety DeShon Elliott said. “We didn’t play like it today.”
That quote might sound like nothing more than Elliott parroting his head coach’s favorite saying. But when you zoom out, it’s also a fitting way to sum up what really went wrong for the Steelers, who squandered a chance at their first 4-0 start since 2020 and their second since 1979.
The Steelers’ winning formula in 2024 — even with a remade QB room — hinges upon a simple concept: old-school Steelers football. This is a team that has invested a host of first-round picks on defense and now pays that side of the ball a league-high $138.5 million. This is a team that made a concerted effort to bolster the offensive line and then hired an offensive coordinator committed to running the ball.
If the Steelers are going to be a contender this season, they will do it with a two-pronged approach: Run the ball effectively, and play dominant defense. Both sides of that equation were missing in Indianapolis.
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The Steelers entered Sunday limiting opponents to a league-best 8.5 points per game. The edge rushers were feasting. The defensive front was stopping the run. And more than anything, the additions in the secondary helped clean up the big plays that plagued the defense last season.
That problem area reared its ugly head again on Sunday, as the Steelers allowed 17 plays of 10-plus yards, including five plays of 20-plus yards. Early on, quarterback Anthony Richardson capitalized on these chunk plays and consistently found the soft spots in the Steelers’ zone to build a 17-0 lead.
“We gotta start faster,” defensive co-captain Cameron Heyward said. “You can dig yourself out of a hole, but you better be damn near perfect.”
The Steelers’ defense was far from that, even though the 39-year-old Flacco had to replace an injured Richardson in the first quarter and bellcow back Jonathan Taylor left late with an ankle injury. The shortcomings were especially eye-popping late. Three times the offense crawled back to make it a one-score game — cutting the Colts’ lead to 17-10, 24-17 and finally 27-24. The first two times that the offense got within striking distance, the defense failed to hold up its end of the bargain, conceding a touchdown and then a field goal that made it a two-possession game.
The defense finally did stand up late, thanks to a second-down sack from Heyward and Larry Ogunjobi, but it was too little too late.
“We expect more out of ourselves,” Elliott said. “We just didn’t play like the team I’ve seen us play like, whether it’s training camp, whether it’s these games.”
Meanwhile, on offense, the Steelers rammed their heads into the wall in the run game against a banged-up Colts defense that came into Sunday as one of the league’s worst at stopping the run. Fields had 10 carries for 55 yards, but Steelers running backs totaled 67 yards on 20 carries, a 3.4 average.
The versatile Cordarrelle Patterson briefly provided a spark late in the second quarter, tallying 43 yards on six carries (7.2 average). However, when he went down with an ankle injury, the run game continued to sputter. Entering the fourth quarter, Harris had more carries (10) than yards (9), and he finished with an average of 1.5 yards per carry, posting 13 carries for 19 yards. According to TruMedia, 23.1 percent of his carries came against an eight-man box.
“They packed the box,” Harris said. “They had a free hitter every time, and we just didn’t put hands on guys that we needed to. That’s what happened.”
After the game, Colts linebacker Zaire Franklin chirped Harris on Twitter, writing, “Kid is soft. 84 (Patterson) run(s) harder.”
In the second half, the Steelers continued to struggle running the ball, but the offense finally came to life. Fields, who completed 22 of 34 passes for 312 yards in the game, credited more first-down passes and more play-action for the success. He also showcased his mobility, rushing for a pair of second-half touchdowns.
Justin Fields pulls it down and takes it himself for the TD!
📺: #PITvsIND on CBS/Paramount+
📱: https://t.co/waVpO8ZBqG pic.twitter.com/xRO2BtspoM— NFL (@NFL) September 29, 2024
“I appreciate his fight,” Tomlin said. “But he — and we — were a little bit sloppy at times, too sloppy to comfortably secure victory.”
That sloppiness reemerged when the Steelers got the ball back with a final chance to win it. After a booming Colts punt, the Steelers started at their 17 with 2:39 left, trailing by three.
After picking up a pair of first downs, they had first-and-10 at their own 42-yard line. About 20 to 30 more yards and they’d be in Chris Boswell’s range. Instead, in what’s becoming a trend, the Steelers botched the shotgun snap.
“My fault,” Fields said. “We’re on the first leg kick, and (center) Zach (Frazier) was IDing and stuff. I felt the DBs rotating and changing the back-end picture. So he was IDing stuff, telling the O-line where to go. I was just trying to get that final picture before the snap came. So at the end of the day, it was on the first leg kick, so after I kicked my leg, I gotta be ready for the ball, no matter when it’s going to come or not.”
Fields recovered the fumble but lost 12 yards and burned nearly half a minute, as the timeout sat in Tomlin’s pocket and the Steelers frantically tried to get back to the line of scrimmage. Two plays later, Harris picked up 11 yards on a third-down checkdown but chose not to go out of bounds. Tomlin still sat on the timeout ahead of a make or break fourth-and-11 that fell incomplete with 29 seconds to play.
“We knew the whole game, they weren’t stopping us. We were just stopping ourselves,” Fields said. “So it’s kind of crazy that we stopped ourselves in the last drive, too.”
Crazy and fitting.
If the Steelers hope to rebound against the Cowboys on “Sunday Night Football” in Week 5, the rash of miscues needs to be cleaned up. But just as much, the Steelers need to find a way to run the ball more effectively and play defense at a level that matches their hefty payroll.
(Photo of Najee Harris: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
