Cleveland Browns is a team that is in first place and has one of the best at Nick Chubb. They had the luxury of facing Browns sans Chubb in their first game of week 6. He has an average of 5.6 yards per try this season, the best of his three-year career. Remove the 47-yard touchdown, in which the Steelers had several missed approaches; Pittsburgh kept Chubbs relatively in control with 61 yards on the ground.
But after Sunday’s game, the Steelers have a new plan for the game – defender Baker Mayfield gets out of his pocket and takes off. In the four previous games against Pittsburgh, Mayfield had a total of 4 rushes on 17 meters. This week, he had six rushes on 44 meters – three on the left and one on the right.
Mayfield, who was more meters on the field than Kareem Hunt, had a big 28-meter run on Steelers territory, eventually setting them for a score. And, of course, the critical third conversion down with one minute left in the game. His three-yard run allowed Browns to run the clock for victory.
“We thought we had to do a better job of containing Mayfield,” Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin told the weekly news conference. “It simply came to our notice then. Not only the big race, like the one in the last part of the third quarter that produced a touchdown unit, but also the conversion races, the third down, when he was in a hurry and making conversions. We know he’s capable of that. So our rush needs to be better, not only in terms of applying pressure, but also in terms of its content, minimizing that component of the game. “