Steelers Lose 17-14 to Hated Ravens

The Steelers lost a heart breaker today to the hated Baltimore Ravens. As we thought, it was a low scoring affair where neither offense was really able to move the ball too well.  In our game day section we said special teams would be important but we weren’t worried about Jeff Reed.  Oops!  Guess we were WAY off huh?  Reed, quite frankly, sucked today. He missed two very makeable field goals.  What the heck was his deal?  Sure the Ravens missed a FG too but this is Reed’s home field, he needs to make those if he wants a job. 

It wasn’t just Reed though, the offense was pretty putrid overall. Mendenhall did as much as he could with 25 carries for 79 yards and 2 TD’s but the team couldn’t move the ball in the air. Phil Simms said he felt that Charlie Batch played a good game, despite his interception at the very end.  We disagree, he was blah at best. He was 12/21 for 141 and a pick.  Look, those aren’t awful per se, but those are not great and not winning numbers obviously. Randle El looked good, but even ‘looking good’ meant a grand total of 2 catches for 50 yards to lead the team!  If that doesn’t  scream we need Ben then we don’t know what does! 

The defense was pretty solid most of the game, led by Lawrence Timmons who was an animal and had 15 tackles.  Problem is, the last Raven drive, what was that? Seriously, a prevent defense never works and that’s what it was. You may say no it wasn’t, they did rush Flacco a little on that drive, and sure, that’s true. But it was prevent, they were playing 5-10 yards off the receiver.   How in the world do you let TJ Houshmazoo get open in the back of the end zone like that? Seriously, how?  Unacceptable. 

Ok, the venting over, the loss to the Ravens is bad but the season is in good shape. We just wanted a 2-2 start from the boys in black and gold minus Ben and we got a 3-1 start.  Would we rathe have traded that 1 loss to the Ravens for a loss with one of the other teams, specifically in the NFC…of course. Yet, if we asked you before the season started if you would take a 3-1 start without Ben we bet you would have jumped on that.  So we’ll take that and move towards the bye week knowing that in 3 hours Ben is reinstated and could provide a major spark to this offense and take a little pressure of the defense.  He get’s a week to prep without a game to play which is big and we think by the time game day rolls around against the Browns in two weeks he’ll be ready to go.

3-1, up next Bye Week.