‘It’s your turn to fumble’
CLEVELAND — “Next man up” took on a whole new meaning in Sunday’s butt-ugly 20-14 Steelers loss to the Cleveland Browns.
The Steelers’ mantra through this injury-plagued season has been that the standard never changes, that when one man goes down with injury, it’s time for the next man to step up and fill the void.
In this case, though, it got so twisted around that “next man up” came to mean, “It’s your turn to fumble.”
Or something like that.
One by one, Steelers running backs trotted onto the field and, within a matter of a few carries, he fumbled. Simple as that.
And it led coach Mike Tomlin to open his post-game comments but calling this game what it was.
“You know that was an ugly performance,” Tomlin said before a reporter could ask a question. “We’ve got to go back to work and get back to playing fundamental football.”
Back in the 1970s, Chuck Noll often used the expression “back to basics,” to say the same thing. In Noll’s case, it meant a back to training camp type of mentality to get all of his players’ head turned in the right direction, to keep them focused, or get them focused.
To a man, the Steelers players say whatever problems they encountered in committing seven turnovers are fixable. The question becomes, how will Tomlin go about fixing them. What does he mean when he says “fundamental football.”
“I don’t know, but I’ve got a pretty good idea I’ll find out this week,” said Rashard Mendenhall, who committed the first turnover with a fumble that turned trimmed the Steelers lead to 7-3 in the first quarter. “We need to get better. We let our team down today.”
“You can’t win the game with seven turnovers,” said Chris Rainey, who had the last fumble by a running back at the end of a 11-yard pass play with 2:26 remaining. “I felt like I lost the game. We had one more chance to go down there and win the game, but I lost it off my hip. I should hold onto the ball, too.”
To Rainey, fundamental football is a simple thing.
“Hold onto the football, do your job, do what you do, don’t try to do too much, just do what you do,” Rainey said before adding that all of the ball security issues are correctable. “Definitely, just don’t put the ball on the ground, that’s all you’ve got to do.”
Even Jonathan Dwyer, who was probably the fan favorite among the Steelers top four backs, was guilty of fumbling and didn’t have much to say in terms of having any answers.
“We put our defense in bad situations today,” Dwyer said. “They played good ball today, but our offense put our defense in bad situations today, field wise.”
Mendenhall said he was a bit surprised by being yanked from the game after fumbling on his second carry of the game, “but we’ve got good runners and this is what goes along with it.”
It all boiled down to Tomlin looking for somebody, anybody who could hold onto the ball until he hit the ground.
“Absolutely,” the coach said. “They were fumbling the ball, so we were going to play people that can secure the football. But after everybody does it, obviously there aren’t choices left.”
Except maybe getting back to fundamental football.
Sports editor Mike Ciarochi may be reached at mciarochi@heraldstandard.com.