Unconventional Preview: Even without Roethlisberger, Steelers should be a tough challenge for Patriots
This would be an excellent time for Stephen Gostkowski to snap out of his first real slump in ages
COMMENTARY
Welcome to Season 5, Episode 7 of the Unconventional Preview, a serious-but-lighthearted, occasionally nostalgia-tinted look at the Patriots’ weekly matchup that runs right here every weekend.
Wow, we’ve hit Episode 7 already? I guess a lot has happened, but it still feels too soon for the season to be approaching the halfway point. Maybe it’s because Tom Brady has played just two games, and there was a sense that things didn’t really get serious until he returned, but this season still feels new.
For all of the drama, Brady’s ridiculous suspension did pass in a blip, having done more good than harm to the Patriots, and another excellent season with the potential to be extraordinary is passing by in a hurry as well.
The Patriots have played six games, won five, used three quarterbacks, won with three quarterbacks, began tinkering with a ferocious two-tight end tandem, kept Rex Ryan employed, and so much more. It’s going well, and it’s going fast.
Under normal circumstances, their matchup versus this Sunday’s opponent might feel like a game that belonged at the end of the schedule – say, in late January. In terms of talent (do they develop a new deep receiving threat every other year or what?) and success (they’re 4-2), they look like one of the few potential roadblocks in the AFC that might keep the Patriots from reaching an eighth Super Bowl in the Brady/Bill Belichick era. You know who they are and what they do, and if you don’t respect them, you should.
Of course, these aren’t normal circumstances this week. Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger – a certain future Hall of Famer based on my rudimentary and unscientific Twitter survey a few days ago – is sidelined this week and presumably for a few more Sundays after suffering a torn meniscus on his knee during a loss to the Dolphins. The removes some luster from this matchup – backup Landry Jones is competent, but he’s no Big Ben.
Still, it is a road game for the Patriots, which is always a challenge, as well as a potential precursor to rematch when much more is at stake. And a Patriots-Steelers showdown at any time of the season is always entertaining, even if there’s an understudy or two in major roles.
So kick it off, Gostkowski, and let’s get this thing started …
THREE PLAYERS I’LL BE WATCHING NOT NAMED TOM BRADY
Le’Veon Bell: Don’t your ears always perk up when Bill Belichick praises an opposing player with more than the standard scouting-report platitudes? You can tell his admiration for, oh, Ed Reed all those years because he would get into detail about why he admired the player, almost as if he truly enjoyed the challenge of game-planning against someone so smart, talented or versatile and wanted to share with football simpletons like us why this guy is so special. That said, I can’t recall Belichick ever dropping an appreciative “Oh my God … tremendous player” before like he did this week when talking about Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell. LeGarrette Blount’s former carpool buddy is obviously a superb running back, one who is averaging 5.5 yards per carry and more than 6 receptions per game in the three he has played since his return from Roger Stokoe Goodell’s Junior College of Petty and Arbitrary Discipline. But to hear Belichick talk at length about how dangerous he is in various ways, even as a downfield receiving threat, is to recognize that Bell is even more impressive to people who really know the game.
Landry Jones: Wait, I thought Charlie Batch was the Steelers’ backup quarterback for life, even if he was old enough to have been a teammate of Lem Barney with the Lions. (So he wasn’t quite that old. Batch, who turns 42 in December, actually retired after the 2012 season. Guess I’m gonna have to update my Ancient Backup Quarterbacks depth chart now.) But there’s one other thing Batch does have in common with Sunday’s starter, the former Oklahoma star Jones, besides a job description: The Steelers tend to fare well when they play. Batch was 6-3 as a starter during his eight years with Pittsburgh, and Jones, in his first real action last season when Roethlisberger began his semi-annual hemorrhaging of body parts, held down the fort with a 1-1 record, including an 8 for 12, two touchdown performance in a Week 6 win over the Cardinals. Jones told his teammates, “Don’t panic,’’ this week, and they shouldn’t. Roethlisberger is terrific, but the Steelers have an impressive survival instinct when he’s absent.
Stephen Gostkowski: I can’t believe I’m going to give Felger and Mazz credit for pointing this out, but here I am, giving Felger and Mazz credit for pointing this out. Gostkowski’s kicking struggles didn’t begin this season; the genesis of his current issues seems to have come from his crucial missed extra point – his first since his rookie season, having made a record 523 in a row – in the AFC Championship Game loss at Denver. Gostkowski has made just 9 of 12 field goals this season – the three misses are his most in a season since 2012 – and he missed an extra-point against the Bengals, just the third of his 11-year career and the second since his rookie season. I believe he’ll be fine – hell, there were five missed extra-point in the league this past week – but right now he does not look like the kicker who not only succeeded Adam Vinatieri successfully but surpassed him in the record book. Even some of his makes have been shaky. It would be reassuring to see him rediscover his form this week before people start making panicked Missin’ Sisson references around here.
GRIEVANCE OF THE WEEK
As if we needed further sickening confirmation that the NFL makes its decisions on discipline based not on what it knows but what it thinks we know, consider this, if you can stomach it:
Goodell and his power-suited pack of manipulative, entitled ownership overlords like John Mara look pathetic now – I should say, pathetic yet again – after it was revealed that idiot Giants kicker Josh Brown, who had been suspended for a whole football game as punishment for an offseason domestic incident, had previously acknowledged beating his wife more than 20 times.
It’s tempting to say this is Ray Rice all over again, but it’s not. The league’s handling of that was awful and inexcusable. This is very possibly worse, if something can be worse than running from evidence that a player had sucker-punched his wife in an elevator. There’s no incriminating video that we know of here, but Brown’s history of spousal brutality is documented in much greater detail than any background that could be dug up on Rice.
They knew this was an evil guy, but gosh, John Mara needs a kicker, and what do we really know anyway? Goodell’s league still hasn’t learned the lesson that controlling the “domestic violence space” should mean only one thing: extracting domestic abusers from the league for as long as legally possible, not covering for them in the hopes that the scandal blows over and the most damning information never reaches the eyes and ears of the public.
Goodell will never do the right thing unless it’s perceived by his toadies as good public relations. He does not have the instinct, compassion, or sense of justice. He is a gross, soulless sausage-casing of a human being, one utterly lacking in integrity, one whose empty authority comes without respect, a demented drone clinging to a precious, dented shield. Good lord, Tagliabue, if only we knew what we had in you.
PREDICTION, OR IS THERE A COACHING GIG WITH BETTER JOB SECURITY THAN THE STEELERS’? Seriously, it’s amazing. They’ve had three coaches since 1969 – current boss Mike Tomlin (2007-present), Bill Cowher (1992-2006), and Chuck Noll (1969-91), and of the three, the legendary four-time Super Bowl champion Noll is the one with the lowest winning percentage, .566. (Of course, he is the one who built the Steel Curtain empire from scratch.) If you knew that the most recent previous coach to these three was someone named Bill Austin (11-28 -3 from 1966-69), congratulations, you must be a Rooney. (If so, please stop enabling that toad Goodell. Thanks.) Anyway, the game: It’ll be tough and close, even without Roethlisberger, but Pittsburgh will miss him enough that the Patriots come away with a road win. How about a Gostkowski walkoff field goal to end it? Patriots 24, Steelers 21.
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