Steelers cool off ‘ hot’ Browns offense
Ithought it was supposed to be hot in the kitchen. Or is that not what Mike Tomlin indicated early in the week? “We love to be in the kitchen; AFC North ball is in the kitchen. It’s hot in the North.”
There are a million or more pejorative adjectives commonly used to describe the Cleveland Browns at Heinz Field, but hot has never been among them. Reliably, the Browns were not hot in any sense Sunday, save perhaps being hot to have the snot knocked out of ’ em for the 17th time in a row.
But the Steelers, as Tomlin indicated, were extremely comfortable in the kitchen, where Minkah Fitzpatrick threw open the window with a first- quarter pick- six, and from that point the larger defenders in front of him felt so good they decided to mop the floor.
They mopped it with Cleveland quarterback Baker Mayfield, who slinked to the bench with a full torso of bruises and a sickly 54.9 passer rating. They mopped it with its own vaunted rushing attack, averaging a league high 188 yards per game at kickoff, slapping it down to less than 40% of that. They mopped it with a raging defensive line and a pair of superstar edge rushers, Bud Dupree and T. J. Watt.
Defensive tackle Cam Heyward had eight tackles, six solo, a quarterback hurry, a tackle for loss and put so much pressure on Mayfield I could almost hear my mother screaming, “Get that filthy ball out of my kitchen! What the hell’s the matter with you?!”
“The front seven did a great job,” Fitzpatrick noted a few minutes after Steelers 38, Browns 7. “They always do a great job against the run, but this week it was really important because they were averaging nearly 200 yards a game; that’s what their offense was based off of.
“T. J., Cam, those guys just shut them down — put them in thirdandlongs, put them in difficult situations.”
Six weeks into a difficult NFL season with no clear roadmap thanks to coronavirus, among the few certainties is that the Steelers’ defensive line and its edge rushers constitute one of the league’s elite forces. Stephon Tuitt had five tackles Sunday, half a sack, two quarterback hurries; Dupree had four tackles, two sacks, two tackles for loss, two hurries; Watt had three tackles plus a tackle for loss, Tyson Alualu, on significantly fewer snaps, still proved an absolute menace, penetrating the Browns backfield, swatting away a Mayfield pass.
Researchers are still flummoxed at the total effectiveness of the
Steelers’ penetrators. All that was known at kickoff was that the team’s 36 tackles behind the line of scrimmage were the most after five NFL games since “at least” 2008. The Steelers added another half dozen Sunday.
It was no surprise that Tomlin and defensive coordinator Keith Butler selected a run- stopping theme as this week’s primary narrative, but not even they anticipated the level of dominance their biggest people provided on the day the Steelers waxed the floor to a gleaming 5- 0.
“This was a group that thrives on runnin’ the football, man, to the tune of 188 yards per game,” Tomlin said of the Browns. “We didn’t wait until the end of the week to acknowledge that we couldn’t allow that to happen. So today was really borne out of our commitment to minimizing that element of play, and it came together for us. This game was going to be decided by our bigs. Our bigs’ ability to stop the run, our bigs’ ability to protect Ben and win the line of scrimmage for us in the run game. We talked openly about it all week. A synopsis of this game in a nutshell is our bigs, our big people on both sides of the ball, really answered the challenge and played ‘ A’ football. ”
Tomlin’s comments here, as ever, are measured and yet descriptive in his singular way. It’s a parallel to his behavior on the Steelers sideline, where he’s acutely aware and meticulously careful about what he’s projecting for the cameras. But if you watched him react to one particular play Sunday, you fully appreciate how satisfied he was with a week of preparation for what he termed a varsity performance.
That happened with a desperate Mayfield standing over a fourth- and- 1, early in the third quarter. Mayfield whirled and handed it to the estimable Kareem Hunt, who took a half step and saw the established reality of just about everything. Tuitt was in his way, Watt was pushing the people in front of him back into him, Heyward was about to plunge every last claw into him. There wasn’t a yard to get. He settled for minus- 1 and paid dearly for it.
Tomlin nearly leaped out of his skin. The kitchen hadn’t been this clean in a long time.
It’s deep in October, and the Steelers still haven’t allowed a 100- yard rusher or a 300- yard passer. They just got finished brutalizing a team that had averaged 37.5 points in a four- game winning streak.
“There are a lot of things we can still improve,” said Heyward. “We gave away some yards at the end, and I didn’t finish a sack which is gonna make me crazy all night. But the important thing is, we stopped the run. When you stop the run early, you can throw the sink at them.”
That’d be the kitchen sink.