The question has been asked for the better part of a decade: How do you beat Tom Brady? How do you keep his offense from scoring on every drive? The Steelers answered that question for us yesterday: Don’t let him touch the football. Right as the game started, Ben basically challenged Brady to a shootout. With the offense firing all over the place, the Patriots were the team who had to try and keep up. Dick LeBeau switched up everything and didn’t even use the famed zone blitz. The DBs were physical against the Pats all afternoon, and the Patriots don’t like to play phyiscal. The Steelers bullied the Patriots on both sides of the ball and they didn’t have an answer. Jump.
FIRST QUARTER
The Steelers would be without James Farrior and Hines Ward. Sounded bad at the time, but maybe the veterans who have only beaten Tom Brady like once weren’t the people to rely on this particular week anyway.
Antonio Brown opens the game with a big return to put the Steelers out near the 40. Ben comes out firing Heath Miller catches passes like it’s his job. More Miller. More catches. Running over people. Puttin’ the team on his back. Ben finally misses a pass and it’s 3rd & 11. It’s cool though, Heath Miller gets open and bowls someone over for a first down. Mewelde Moore shakes off a hit at the goal line and plunges in. 7-0.
More plays designed for Miller on that drive than in the whole rest of his career.
Shaun Suisham’s kickoff rolls out of bounds. He’s falling out of favor in Pittsburgh and you can feel it.
The Pats come out with a quick completion stopped short of a first down. Law Firm goes up the middle and the defensive line swallows him in the backfield. Brady looks for Wes Welker on 3rd down but Ike Taylor is mauling him at the line of scrimmage. They have no timing they go three and out. Huge statement by the defense.
Jerricho Cotchery makes his first reception as a Steeler. Admirable fill-in for Ward on that play. Heath Miller makes another reception. Looks like Bruce Arians found a weakness in the Patriots’ defense. Turns out the Patriots’ womanly DBs don’t match up well with a huge, physical, surehanded receiver.
“I got this.”
Heath Miller will never be Antonio Gates, because he runs out and blocks for Mike Wallace to pick up a first down. Dallas Clark would have gone to the sidelines for an appletini. Mendenhall plunges through the line for some big yardage. The Steelers call a timeout facing 2nd & goal.
Antonio Brown can’t hang on to a pass in the end zone. Ben had about 3 acres of open space to his left if he wanted to run, but some fat dude fell on his leg on the last play. Penalty if you do it to Brady, guaranteed. He gets sacked on 3rd & goal.
JUNK
Steelers ran 26 plays to the Pats’ 3. Outgained them 140 to 7. Twenty-six plays on offense, and the defense only had to play for like 25 seconds. THAT is how you beat the Patriots.
SECOND QUARTER
Suishams kicks a 33-yard field goal. 10-0.
Welker makes a catch. That RB with 4 names carries for 2 yards and a first down. Kevin Faulk catches a couple passes. Larry Foote gets called for holding. Ho hum.
Some non-play happens and a fight almost breaks out. The Patriots suddenly break out of that and line up to run a play like nothing happened. Then Deion Branch doesn’t catch a pass. The referee staring at him doesn’t throw a flag so he turns and asks someone else for a penalty call. The ref presumably sees his Patriot jersey and dutifully obeys his request. Automatic first down.
Woodley chases Tom Brady and he has to throw it away. He chases him again on the next play. Brady runs backwards. 15-yard sack. Punt.
That scrum got the Wood fired up.
Ben pump fakes like 20 or 30 times and gets sacked. 3rd & 17 is a pretty tough down, but you’re at least going for a punt at that point. Instead, Ben finds a wide-open Gary Guyton. He runs it back to the 7. You can’t make those mistakes against the Patriots. They score immediately. 10-7.
Miller made the tackle. Just sayin’.
A defender falls out down and Ben finds Sanders for 26 yards. The Steelers run a bizarre QB sneak on first down and Ben gets 2 yards.
The Pats draw a penalty on Kemoeatu, but Ben keeps the play going and Mike Wallace draws pass interference on Patrick Chung. Offsetting penalties. Blood Type gets a first down. Mike Wallace makes another big catch. He’s getting the kind of looks Heath Miller got in the first quarter. Roethlisberger stands in the face of some defensive lineman and fires a ball to Antonio Brown. He stretches over the goal line. 17-7.
Polamalu times the snap count and Rob Gronkowski takes advantage of the blitz. Big completion. Brady completes a couple to Welker inside the two minute warning. Polamalu hops on Gronkowski for a piggy back ride. Brady finally gets some pressure and Woodley brings him down. Gostkowski sneaks a 46-yard field goal through the uprights. 17-10.
The Steelers test the waters with 25 seconds left. Moore runs a halfback draw for like 18 yards. They call a timeout to line up for a shot downfield. Every timeout results in a commercial, like watching basketball. Mewelde Moore gets a bunch of yardage but the clock runs out.
HALFTIME
What exactly do these people do? Do they just award companies for things?
THIRD QUARTER
The Patriots get the ball to start the second half. Time to see whose halftime adjustments were better.
Ryan Clark cannonballs himself into BJGE. Brady throws a ball over Welker’s head. Not a difficult thing to do. Cortez Allen holds Gronkowski one yard short of a first down. The Patriots punt. CBS shows a montage of Hines Ward almost coaching the DBs.
Mendenhall opens the drive with a first down. The Steelers keep running the ball from a no-huddle offense. Not giving the defense a chance to rest. Miller makes a big catch but it gets called back on a penalty. Mike Carey called it on #8. So, Tommy Maddox with offensive pass interference.
3rd & 15 sucks but the Pats’ pass-rush is lazy and Emmanuel Sanders gets separation at the sticks. Huge conversion. Blood Type makes a big play to set up the Steelers at the 11. They can’t convert. Suisham punches in a 21-yard field goal. 20-10.
A Patriot got hit on a tackle so the officials throw a flag. LaMarr Woodley is shaken up.
Chris Carter replaces him at OLB. Brett Keisel probably has defended more passes than Champ Bailey by now. Someone gets unblocked and Brady has to dump the ball off to Faulk on 3rd & 11. Polamalu is all over him. He gets up with an unbelievable fist-pump. First celebration of any kind in Polamalu’s career. Gostkowski attempts a field goal…
Goalpost.
Blitzburgh Guest Appearance by Ty Conklin.
Ben gets sacked and fumbles. He recovers it, but come on man, we’ve got the momentum. Then he throws a bad pass into the ground. It’s all good though, because Blood Type converts the 250th third down of the day. Mendenhall snags a pass in the flat and converts another first down.
FOURTH QUARTER
Heath Miller opens the 4th quarter just short of a first down. Blood Type converts it and adds 15 with a facemask. Awful penalty by Patrick Chung.
Marcus Gilbert turns a 3rd & 5 into a 3rd & 10. Ben doesn’t like something and spends a second timeout. Coming out of that, he hits Brown but he’s short of the sticks. Suisham. 23-10. 11:26 left.
Brady gets the ball at the 20. Chris Carter gets all kinds of held with no call. Taylor breaks up a deep pass to some bro you’ll never hear of. Gronkowski picks up ten yards.
Kevin Faulk gets called for a chop block. Brady runs around and flips the ball to Faulk. Faulks runs around and goes down. Patriots’ offensive line was MIA throughout that play. Ike Taylor is apparently murdered on the play. Fortunately that was 4th down so the Pats don’t get a chance to take advantage of Taylor’s injury.
The ensuing drive takes some time off the clock but it’s not as productive. Suisham misses a field goal and the Pats take over, down 13 with 6 minutes left. Polamalu pulls some WWE kind of tackle out on Wes Welker. One might say he got him by the Head & Shoulders. Okay that was bad, sorry.
Gronkowski gets a first down and gets out of bounds. Kevin Faulk does that thing he always does where he catches a pass and for some reason no one can tackle him, despite him being 55 years old.
Branch gets way overthrown and wants that to be a penalty. Heinz Field comes to life and Vollmer false starts. Gronkowski catches a pass at the inch line. If that’s Santonio Holmes against the Ravens, it’s a TD. The Pats presumably value their timeouts too much to challenge right now. Kevin Faulk gets stoned at the goal line. Reminiscent of the 49ers making that tackle against the Bengals in the Superbowl.
On 4th down Brady flips a ball into the end zone. Gay jumps up and gets his hands on it to deflect it away. Ryan Mundy ends up with the ball but Rob Gronkowski draws a defensive holding penalty. That ball wasn’t going anywhere near him after Gay jumped up and hit it. It’s the Pats though, and since Brady is supposed to be a super-great clutch QB, they make sure to give him another 4 downs to work with. Hernandez scores. People are going to point to this touchdown as evidence of Brady’s 4th quarter reputation, not factoring in the fact that it took him five downs from the 1-inch line to get into the end zone.
Gostkowski whiffs on the onside kick. This ain’t field turf, man. You can’t just kick the top of the ball and let it bounce up. It goes about 4 yards. Thanks for the field position though.
The Patriots spend all 3 timeouts and the Steelers get the first down to really put the pressure on.
Ben drops back and gets sacked for 12 yards. Whatever, the clock runs. Then he takes another sack. I get that it’s better to run the clock than throw an incompletion, but that’s effectively out of range for a clinching field goal. Sepulveda comes on for his first (!) punt of the day.
Wes Welker catches the pass at the 22. Nineteen seconds remain on the clock. Brady drops back and the Steelers rush 3 linemen. Time for Mr. Clutch to pull out a late game win like h- oh wait
“You dropped something.”
Brady fumbles like a bitch. The ball lies by itself on the turf and Polamalu appears out of nowhere to Falcon-Punch the ball away from the Patriots’ linemen. It flies into the end zone and Ziggy Hood chases it down to ensure a safety. 25-17. A brief review upholds the play.
The Patriots try an onside free punt. That unsurprisingly does not work. The Steelers get the ball in the victory formation.
Pictured: Exactly one clutch QB.
- Polamalu escapes the no-forward-fumble rule by not being on the fumbling team.
- Does it seem like a lot more safeties are being scored this year?
- Bruce Arians deserves a ton of credit. He kept the Steelers’ offense on the field and the defense well rested throughout the game.
- Took some cajones for LeBeau to abandon the zone blitz, but the tight man coverage really messed up the Patriots’ rhythm.
- Mark Madden quit Twitter. Poor baby isn’t so tough when people can respond to him. Just makes today that much better.
- Gonna need a different defensive gameplan next week. Baltimore’s receivers are a lot tougher than the pretty boys in New England.
- Still gonna sit back and bask in this win for a while.
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