All summer, all we’ve had to hear about regarding the 2010 Steelers is the indisputable fact that without Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers would lose 16 games. This was not debatable. There is no one else who plays football in Pittsburgh. They have no defensive players, running backs, nor receivers that can help an inexperienced backup. Surely, with Ben Roethlisberger missing four whole games, the Pittsburgh Steelers were doomed to the first draft pick in April 2011.
Oh, wait, the Steelers have a kickass defense and a growing running game, plus a few wily pass-catchers perfectly capable of managing a game. To all the talking heads in the media predicting the Steelers would finish behind Cleveland, this game is a big ol’ “f**k you.”
It was ugly, it was 110% defense, and generally played like a Ravens game with lower stakes. And I’ll be honest here, I had a big ol’ recap all typed up, and just as I went in to add comically timed images and a Spongebob Youtube or two, my computer freaked out and powered off. So there’s no recap for this game. Perhaps 2010 is the year of the cursed recaps. Here are the standout impressions, a day and a half later:
- Dixon didn’t instill confidence. Everyone is talking about how good he looked in the second half, but I watched him hit three Falcons in the chest along with his bomb to Mike Wallace and his rollout completion to Hines Ward on the sideline. That play didn’t go for the first down we all wanted, but it was still a good thing to see across the board.
- Arians was definitely keeping the training wheels on. The whole first half was made of runs and screens, mostly to Heath Miller. You want a young QB to start off with a few easy completions, right? Who better to throw to than Heath? He proved it again: he’s always going to catch the pass and he’s going to get extra yardage with it.
- The defense was in 2008 form. Despite Roddy White having a big game and generally being a thorn in our collective side, the D held a pretty good offense to 9 points. Michael Turner was invisible. Great showing by all the guys.
- The offensive line did pretty well. Mendenhall wasn’t reeling off huge gains, but then again the Falcons didn’t really have to respect the pass. They could pretty well stack the box with 9 guys and test Dixon, especially given the lack of deep passes in the gameplan. As for the pass-blocking, Dixon didn’t take a ton of big hits. I’d say the line played well enough.
- The Falcons probably had an emotional pregame fire-up speech where someone told the defense to play 60 minutes of football. And they did play exactly 60 minutes of football.
So much going on in Week 1. We’re probably gonna go around the league with everything sometime this week.
