WEEKEND SPORTS
Productivity drops with traditional play-calling
The Steelers are 11-0, but their latest performance had Mike Tomlin channeling John McKay in his memorable postgame rant. When McKay, the first coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, was asked by a reporter what he thought of his team’s execution after a loss, he replied: “I’m in favor of it.”
Tomlin replaced McKay’s deadpan with some brutal bluntness in his colorful postgame assessment. There is one big difference between McKay and Tomlin, however. McKay’s expansion Bucs went 0-14 in their inaugural 1976 season. Tomlin is 11-0 and is coaching the only remaining unbeaten team in the NFL in 2020.
So it might seem asinine to suggest the Steelers should undergo drastic changes to jump-start their stagnant offense under these circumstances. Then again, the playoffs are five weeks away, and it’s hard to imagine the Steelers sticking around for long if their offense continues to sputter the way it has over the past month.
The Steelers are coming off their lowest scoring output of the season against the Ravens, and they demonstrated little consistency in three of the previous four games, with the only outlier being a dominating win from start to finish over the hapless Bengals.
Is the answer for the Steelers as simple as letting Ben Roethlisberger run the offense out of the no-huddle?
There wasn’t much positive news to come out of Wednesday’s game for the offense, but Roethlisberger was terrific when they went without a huddle. He operated out of the no-huddle on 13 of the Steelers’ 71 plays. On those 13 plays, the Steelers averaged 9.3 yards per play. He was 10 for 12 for 118 yards out of the no-huddle, and five of those completions were for 10 yards or more.
On the other 58 plays the Steelers ran out of the huddle, they averaged 3.6 yards per play. Roethlisberger was 26 for 39 for 148 yards. Of those 26 completions, only four of them went for 10 yards or more.
So why not make the no-huddle the Steelers’ offensive identity? For as successful as Roethlisberger has been out of the no-huddle, the Steelers don’t go to it all that often.
In the past five games, the no-huddle has accounted for just 12% of the team’s offensive plays. And yet the Steelers have produced nearly one-fifth of their offensive yards in that five-game span from it.
Roethlisberger didn’t just get hot against the Ravens when he ditched the huddle. Over the past five games, when Roethlisberger runs the offense out of the no-huddle, he’s nearly unstoppable. He was 28 for 35 for 307 yards and two touchdowns, plus two pass interference penalties that resulted in 35 additional yards.
Roethlisberger has no problem doing more no-huddle, but he does prefer to have offensive coordinator Randy Fichtner script the first few series before going to it.
“It helps sometimes to feel the defense out,” Roethlisberger said. “I don’t have a problem going with it right from the beginning. We try to call plays and let the defense adjust to us. We try not to call plays to adjust to the defense. Typically, when we get into a flow, we want to call the right play and find the right matchup. Sometimes it is a little easier to wait until the third or fourth series because you get a feel for what they’re doing, the kind of looks they’re giving against certain personnel and certain formations.”
The advent of the no-huddle offense has its roots in Cincinnati in the late 1980s, when Sam Wyche popularized it and gave fits to opposing defenses. Buffalo perfected it in the early 1990s and ran it as their base offense when they played in four consecutive Super Bowls.
During this century, it hasn’t been a base offense very often, but veteran quarterbacks such as Peyton Manning and Tom Brady used it with great success. Roethlisberger, who is in his 17th NFL season, has the same type of command and knowledge to orchestrate it when needed.
And the Steelers just might need more of it as they try to lock up the No. 1 seed in the AFC. It turned out to be a godsend against the Ravens on Wednesday because their defense had a bead on the Steelers when they huddled and called from their traditional playbook.
“My belief with Ben, if he knows he’s got three opportunities to get 10 yards throwing the ball, I would never bet against that,” Fichtner said. “You keep getting first downs, you break one, someone gets 20 yards and you move the ball down the yard. He had two really good [no-huddle] drives. Instead of yanking out of the nohuddle in the red zone, we kept going. Then all of a sudden we had a drop that might have been a touchdown. We kick a field goal.
“The next series he took them down and then finished with a touchdown to JuJu [Smith-Schuster] with one of our scripted routes [out of a huddle]. The difference between this game and the first game against the Ravens is we scored. This week, we didn’t score as much as we should have scored for whatever reason, whether it was a drop or miscommunication in the route.”
With a short week to prepare before Washington comes to town on Monday, the Steelers could lean on their no-huddle offense more because there isn’t the normal amount of preparation time for the coaches to put together and install a game plan. It also might make sense to tire out a very talented front four that features some of the best young pass rushers in the league.
“We’ve got a very extensive backside of the play-call sheet, the no-huddle,” Roethlisberger said. “We do a lot in that area. We can pull from that. Those are things the guys have known from Day 1. We’ve been doing it a long time. When you get short weeks, you can rely on stuff that we know. You’ll still have some specialty plays, some game-plan things against a defense like this, but rather than throw a bunch of new stuff in, we’ll rely on some old stuff we have with smaller changes.”