Steelers’ D looked old
BALTIMORE – Experience vs. age.
The Steelers came into Sunday’s game against the Ravens as perhaps the beat prepared among 32 NFL franchises to handle the effects of no offseason workouts due to the lockout.
Their experience was the key factor, everybody said, myself included.
Maybe somebody forget to tell the Baltimore Ravens that they were supposed to roll over for the Steelers, who were coming off another Super Bowl appearance and seemed another year better, not another year older.
The Steelers looked old in Sunday’s 35-7 loss to the Ravens.
Old and slow and not able to anything about either.
Seven turnovers and a Hall of Fame caliber performance from Joe Flacco later, you have to wonder whether age has caught up with the Steelers.
Was it just me or did the Ravens seem to be at least one step ahead of the Steelers all day Sunday? It didn’t seem to matter if the offense or defense was on the field, Baltimore seemed to be out-thinking, as well as out-playing the Steelers.
“It felt like that to me, too,” linebacker James Farrior said when it was all over. “It felt like we were a step slow the whole game.”
It started on the first play from scrimmage, when Ravens running back Ray Rice ripped off a 36-yard run on the way to a 107-yard effort against a defense that prides itself on stopping the run.
“No doubt about it, that first play set the tone for the day,” Farrior said. “After that, they just put their foot on the gas pedal.”
“You know how we play defense,” safety Ryan Clark said. “We stop the run first, then worry about everything else. We just didn’t feel right out there today. We weren’t in the right gaps and when one of us isn’t in the right gap, it throws everything else off.”
Clark believes the Steelers can overcome this extremely poor opening performance, but he believes it will take a change in attitude to make it happen.
“It’s the ‘been there’ attitude and we need to get rid of it,” Clark. “It doesn’t matter now that we were in the Super Bowl last season or three seasons ago. That does us no good at all this season.
“When you’re down 21-7 at halftime, you can’t just think that it’ll be like the AFC Championship game from last season. Just cause we overcame it then, doesn’t make it easy and it doesn’t mean we’ll do it again.”
“It seemed like nothing was going right,” receiver Hines Ward said. “That’s what today was like, but we have to move on and get ready for Seattle.”
“We were a step off here, two steps off there,” quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said. “They got after us pretty good and I made some bad plays.”
Roethlisberger is right, but he was not alone. In fact, I can’t think of one player who had a good game for the Steelers.
The defense was off, the offense had seven turnovers and the special teams were nothing special.
If the Steelers experience is still trumping its age, especially on defense, we’ll see that over the long haul. If age is beginning to show cracks in the armor, we’ll know a lot sooner.
Sports editor Mike Ciarochi may be reached at mciarochi@heraldstandard.com.