You knew this was coming, didn’t you?
It’s never that easy with this team.
In a game that could have clinched the division for the Steelers, Pittsburgh dropped a 13-6 game to Cleveland, giving the Browns their fourth win of the season and allowing them to be a thorn in the side of the Steelers as they try and claw their way into the postseason.
The Steelers are now 1-6-1 in Cleveland since 2018, and have not won on the road against the Browns since Ben Roethlisberger retired.
It all sets up a Week 18 game in Pittsburgh on Sunday night that will decide the division. Oh golly gee!
But before we try and turn our attention to that, here’s my thoughts on the loss.
1: The Steelers Do Not Deserve The Playoffs
The Steelers could have gotten into the playoffs on Saturday night, had Green Bay been able to pull off the win against Baltimore. A Packers win would have clinched the division for the Steelers.
Steelers fans were watching closely, hoping that Sunday’s visit to Cleveland would suddenly mean next to nothing. That’s not new to them, they are used to watching other games at the end of the year to try and get in.
But, in a battle of two backups, the Ravens ultimately came out on top, running all over the Packers and extending their season by at least one day more. It shouldn’t have mattered, though. The Steelers had a prime opportunity to simply win it for themselves, making Week 18 moot with a win against the lowly 3-12 Browns.
And when you are presented with such an opportunity, you have to take advantage of it. Pittsburgh did the exact opposite of that. They slugged their way to six points while making the Browns look like the team who was fighting for their playoff lives.
Teams who blow opportunities like that do not deserve a playoff spot. It’s as simple as that.
Look, the Steelers can still get in. It’s a simple win-and-you’re-in situation in Week 18, at home, against a team that you’ve already defeated on the road this year. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the Steelers pull that off, and get into the playoffs as the four-seed.
But that will not change my opinion that this team doesn’t deserve it. Does Baltimore? I don’t know. Maybe none of the AFC North teams do this year, Steelers included.
2: Myles Garrett
Arthur Smith’s offense looked like it had one clear priority in this game, and it was not to try and score points. It was simply to prevent Myles Garrett from getting a sack and breaking the all-time record. His shy, timid offense succeeded in that, at the cost of a win and potentially a playoff spot.
And for as much as players and coaches might downplay how large the threat of Garrett’s record-breaking sack loomed, you can’t deny the human factor of all of this. No one, even a man as accomplished and vaunted as Aaron Rodgers, wants to be the next Brett Farve or Tyler Huntley.
Garrett got in the head of the Steelers, who altered their entire gameplan and playbook to simply disallow one sack to one guy. It got Rodgers to look like Steelers-era Mitch Trubisky on the field: a guy always looking over his shoulder and not being able to make a confident throw for his life.
The threat of Garrett was had more of an impact than he himself actually did, and I mean that as a compliment.
Looking back, Rodgers should have fell to the ground the first time Garrett got near him. He should have gone the way of his Packers forefather and given Garrett an easy (and perhaps, maybe “cheap”) sack early in the game, so that the Steelers could move on and get to their game.
(Just as a quick side note, I did find it funny how much the CBS broadcast thought that a Garrett sack was a given, and that it would happen rather quickly, just for it to never happen at all.)
3: Wide Receivers…Or Lack Thereof
The lack of a second wide receiver has been an issue for the Steelers all year. But at no time was it a bigger one than the time that their first wide receiver was missing.
The Steelers badly missed DK Metcalf, who is serving the first of a two game suspension for an altercation with a fan last week in Detroit. Suddenly, that second game that he will miss looms pretty large, doesn’t it?
In Cleveland, Steelers wide receivers combined for two catches and 18 yards in the first half. By comparison, Browns wide receivers combined for eight catches and 116 yards.
By the end, Pittsburgh’s wide receivers combined for eight catches and just 62 yards. No wide receiver for the Steelers had more than Scotty Miller’s 25 yards.
Marquez Valdes-Scantling was targeted nine times, but only accounted for 21 yards. Adam Thielen had two catches for 16, and was not much of a factor in this one.
Rodgers targeted Valdes-Scantling three times in a row to end the game. All of them fell incomplete. Should Rodgers have looked somewhere else to go with the ball? Absolutely. But when the Steelers’ playoff-clinching hopes hinge on a player who was cut by San Francisco and spent several weeks on the practice squad for the Steelers, that’s the sign of an improperly constructed wide receiver room.
That falls on the general manager Omar Khan. Two years in a row now.
4: The Tomlin Special
I don’t think it comes as much of a surprise to Steelers fans that this was a loss. And if it feels like these kinds of losses, to teams way below them in the standings, are becoming an annual occurrence, it’s because they are.
Per Doug Clawson of CBS Sports, the Steelers are 0-4-1 in their last five games against teams who are eight or more games below .500. That ties the longest streak in NFL history.
That is such an unbelievably damning stat.
And these losses are making significant alterations to Pittsburgh’s seeding at the end of the year. For example, the back-to-back losses to 2-10 teams in 2023 was the difference between getting the sixth seed that season and the second seed.
This year, this loss to the 3-12 Browns could mean the difference between getting into the playoffs as the four-seed, and watching the tournament from the couch.
It’s just simply unacceptable.
5: Poor Decision Making
I want to talk about a play that happened near the end of the first half, and how it might have impacted the rest of the game.
The Steelers had a golden opportunity after Jack Sawyer intercepted a tipped ball deep in Cleveland territory, giving the ball to his offense at the Browns’ 31-yard line with just under five minutes to go in the second.
The drive started with a shove to Connor Heyward for a loss of three, but Jaylen Warren and Rodgers himself were able to both gain six yards a piece on the ground to set up a 4th-and-1 on Cleveland’s 22-yard line.
The Steelers get up to the line and set up in the Western Pennsylvania version of the Tush Push (what they call the Spartan), but as they are getting set up, Tomlin calls a timeout. Coming out of the break, the Steelers don’t go back to the look they showed Cleveland, and instead go with an empty backfield.
Rodgers fires it to a streaking Scotty Miller down the sideline in the endzone, where it falls decidedly incomplete.
In a game where points were at an absolute premium, every part of that felt like the wrong decision.
You can certainly make the argument on going for it there, but you do not run a sideline shot to the endzone on a 4th-and-1 like that. Worry about simply getting the one yard you need, and go from there. That decision also cost the Steelers a potential three points via a field goal, which would have made it 10-6 at the time and 10-9 when the half ended.
Since the Steelers didn’t score at the end, it truthfully doesn’t matter all that much. But, I wonder if being in a position where a touchdown wins it at the end of the game changes anything to their approach.
Fifth Avenue Sports 
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