PITTSBURGH – You can watch an interesting half of a football match and it can convince you that everything you saw in the last month was wrong. This is what we do as NFL observers. It is the essence of our weekly column of exaggerated reactions.
Example: Steelers were ready. I mean, ready. They looked ready until December, especially when they lost to the Bengals last Monday and even overtook Sunday afternoon, when they watched the Colts 24-7 at the end of the third quarter and could not enter the final four. consecutive attempts from inside the line of 2 yards. They had no running game. Ben Roethlisberger made terrible throws after terrible throws. Ended with a capital “D” and rhyming with “E” and means “Early Exit Playoff”.
And then, just like that, they weren’t.
After Colts ‘goal position, the Steelers defense strengthened and forced a point, which the Steelers returned to Colts’ 39-meter line. And even in the next play, Roethlisberger found Diontae Johnson with a Picasso shot out of nowhere for a touchdown that reduced the lead to 10 points.
A switch had turned. Suddenly, the Colts couldn’t do anything on offense and the Steelers, who had only accumulated 95 yards in a sleepy first half, couldn’t be stopped. Roethlisberger threw touchdown passes to Eric Ebron and JuJu Smith-Schuster in the fourth quarter, and Pittsburgh came back to win 28-24, earning its first AFC North title in three years.
When it was over, Smith-Schuster came for the postgame interview with us and explained that Roethlisberger gave a break at the break where he told the team he didn’t look like he was having fun. So they came out in the second half and had a lot of stuff.