Will Allen on the Steelers problems in 2012

If Will Allen wanted to REALLY tell it like it is he would say this: "Last year was a tale of two seasons on EACH side of the ball". Early in the year the offense was moving the ball and Haley put in place game plans that would have won games if not for stupid fumbles. Also the defense blew games more than they have in a long time. Giving up 34 to the RAIDERS!? That's NOT on Haley. AB fumbling the ball away when all he had to do was go down? Not on Haley. Letting Matt Hasslebeck march it up and down the field on Ike and Keenan in TN? Not on Haley. Icing your own kicker who was OUT of his field goal range? Not on Haley. EIGHT fumbles in Cleveland and we STILL almost won the game? Not on Haley. Taking a qb that's a little bit younger than dirt and going in to Baltimore and winning? Maybe Haley CAN coordinate. Ben throwing a game losing pick in Dallas? Well take away AB's stupid special teams fumble and that never happens. Still that play call was on Haley. After Ben's injury going Run, Run, Pass, Run, Run, Pass? Yeah that was on Haley. Although I wonder how much of that game planning was due to the fact that Ben was OBVIOUSLY NOT back to normal. This season was a total team effort. Period. There were times the offense clicked. There were times the defense clicked. There were rarely times that BOTH clicked and therefore we were 8-8. I just wonder IF Ben would have stayed healthy and IF he would've finished the year with the great numbers he was surely on pace for if this would've been an issue. Also Allen didn't talk about the absolute decimation on both sides of the ball. At one point this year I counted 29 people that had missed time! 29!!! WHO can overcome that? Not just scrubs either. A franchise qb, a starting rb, your top paid WR, your top paid LB, your top paid FS, your top paid CB, your top paid, your #1 draft pick, your #2 draft pick. I know we just like to look at the bottom line. But the reality is it took a number of things to get us to that bottom line and the fact is that from Tomlin right on down to the ball boy this season was just a dud and to blame ONLY Haley for it is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. If you have one shred of reason in your mind you will consider what I have said and surely see that it was NOT just Haley or Tomlin or Ben or Lebeau or Woodley or Wallace or Troy or Mendy or AB or Lewis or Victorian or Ike or Hampton or whoever! It was ALLLLLL of them!!! Good grief I wish some of you people could see more trees than forest some times! Class dismissed. Carry on.

 

I agree that Haley needs to be flexible but so does Ben. They've got to both understand that there will be some mutual benefit to compromising with each other. It's gong to take some growing up on Ben's part and I hope he's willing to do it. He's made some comments in the offseason that give me hope that he's finally willing to assert a leadership role with this team. With the leadership vacuum that's been created the last couple of years, we need that.

 

I thought you would. I don't know how anyone could DISagree. It all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

 

I'm sure there were things going on behind the scenes. I'm sure there are ALWAYS things going on behind the scenes. But the fact is that on a lot of Sundays we were positioned to win games and we failed. Now it's hard for me to believe that dropping a pass or fumbling a ball or blowing a coverage is the result of a petty argument that might've happened at practice earlier that week and if we have a bunch of divas that live in la la land and wanna think life is a fairy tale and that everything is gonna be perfect we had better get used to some 8-8 seasons. I honestly think this crap wouldn't have happened if we had won some of the close games that we lost. Couldn't people also say there were problems when BA was here? I mean obviously the Rooney's wanted rid of him right? I wonder if we'd had some 8-8 seasons if then players would have blamed management in that case too. Well, actually, I don't have to wonder. JFK said this one time and I think it fits this season PERFECTLY. "Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan". When things are going good on a team you can't see the end of the line of guys taking credit or giving credit away. They may say "Oh yeah I'm throwing the ball great but my receivers catching it great too" or "Oh man our coach just always has us ready to play" or "oh man we are all just so focused". But when things are going bad it's "oh man I MYSELF prepare all week and put my heart and soul in to this but I just don't understand why we're losing" or "well yeah there's some guys not happy" or whatever. You know what I mean? The season sucked and therefore Haley is gonna get called out because Lebeau is too much of an icon around here to bare any blame. Haley called some very stupid games this year. Lebeau allowed the Chargers to march up and down on us to the point that Tomlin flat out said "we couldn't stop them". Well we about the ONLY team that couldn't stop them because they were bottom feeders this year. It was a team effort and I'm glad Will Allen is gone. I hope we start winning for sure and if Haley IS the problem then he can pack his bags and hit the ground running for all I care. I wanna win and I don't care how. Dink and Dunk. West Coast. Power running. Special Teams. Whatever. I wanna win and whatever "system" helps us win is the system I want. And I'm sure I speak for most of us in that regard.

 

Chemistry was down near the bottom of the list as a reason why the team finished where they did. I am not sure a head coach or anyone else can fix chemistry at any point of a season. IMO it kind of goes something like this: when a team loses, the chemistry is not good. when a team wins the chemistry is good. Winning generally cures all.

The two biggest reasons why this team finished 8-8 were 1) turnovers and 2) injuries.

The Steelers offense was never a high powered offense with Ben as the QB. It's safe to say that it's a 90% chance that the offense will never be high powered as long as Ben is the QB.

 

I am glad I ain't shelling out the 5 grand for season tickets this year, For all you people that have never seen a game,
here is your chance to see the Steelers, they will be giving tickets away. Especially when it gets cold.

 

Thats what's up! The truth shall set you free.

 

it's not about making them like him. it's not letting the players run the team. they hired haley to run his offense, good,bad or indifferent. it's not up to the qb to change things back to the old way. run the offense your coach is putting on the table, like it or not. haley was flexible, he let ben call signals and run things from the prior years even after ben just took it on his own to do it mid game. that's where tomlin should have stepped in and said ben get with the program. wallace get with the program. AB you got paid, pick it up. woodley get your azz in shape. he didn't have a problem benching RB's.

you and i have different feelings about our firepower. mendy didn't have a good year and we were 8-8. the two years prior he had good years and we were 12-4. wallace had near his same production. redman and dwyer got their chance to be the feature guy and blew it. they are back, i don't see how this improved us.

bringing in bradshaw we know is hurt again, doesn't guarantee anything but it does spend money we don't have. redman didn't run to sign his tender either. same as sanders. i never did hear if batch did.

we are far weaker then last year and even farther weaker then 2-3 years ago as far as scorers. i'm not sure rookies are going to make up 16-20 TD's. not to mention losing 3 starters off the defense. i see a long season in 2013. as i said months and months ago, we will see draft picks, UDFA's and a few low level free agents spotted all over this team this year. it's looking like i hit that on the head. heath being out early, if he is, really,really hurts us. i hope i'm wrong.

 

If that's the case we need to put Sanders on the pine if or when we see the first sign of Wallace act 2. The Steelers never have and I don't believe as long as the Rooney's are the owners will ever take guff from any player. Thats what makes them different than any other run of the mil NFL losing team.

 

IF you let it!

 

Wow. Is there a way to quote everything ever written on here and put it in your post? I wanna do that!

 

I don't want to hear about the labor pains, just show me the baby.

Excuses are for chumps.

21st in offense.
26th in rushing (which he was brought in to fix).

Class dismissed.

 

I agree. Our highest scoring game was lower than NE's average scoring game. We only had one game, Oakland, where we scored more points than than the average of four other teams average scoring. Keep your third down conversions and score more points.

It is so ridiculous to cherry pick one or two plays from a game to justify why we lost and whose fault it is. Football is much more complicated than that. My teams fumble and win by scoring touchdowns.

 

this has to be the longest quotes i have ever seen...
HINES

 

What's interesting to me is that people are trying to defend a problem (Haley) that was . . .

*ANTICIPATED (or maybe nobody remembers some of us posting over the Summer that Haley was going to be a problem and Pro Football Talk and all of the other insiders/experts suggesting it might be a problem and even giving us daily "did Ben and Todd talk yet?" updates)

*CONFIRMED (our offense sucked)

and

*VALIDATED (reports of skills players unahappy with their roles, Will Allen's testimony, etc).

To argue at this point is ridiculous. The Haley apologists have NOTHING to lean on. They might after 2013, but they don't. You're measured on one thing alone: results (#miketomlinsuperbowlring #brucearianssuperbowlring). And I'm sure that if the offense sucks again, it won't be Haley's fault to them. It'll be Tomlin, Ben, fumbles, injuries, the defense, Micronesia, global warming, George W. Bush, a weather balloon, Big Foot . . .

 

The Illuminati

 

Do some of you even watch the games? To say that our very costly turnovers and mistakes didn't bite us in the ass big time is ridiculous . How many games would have turned out differently if not for the players making crucial and critical mistakes? Do you think while they were dropping passes ,fumbling the ball and missing blocks,tackles and gift interceptions the players were thinking in the back of their minds " what a Dick that Haley is". .

its just a sad reality that we are and probably always will be a win by the skin of our teeth football team. That my friends is STEELER football. Even at our best we are scraping by and winning games with big plays on both the O and the D. I learned a long time ago to stop comparing ourselves to the Pats. We will never execute at the rate they do. We have our own style and that works for us. The reality of today's NFL is that there isn't much that separates the good teams from the bad. It does usually come down to one-play here or there. Look at what the Rats did this year.

while I'm not sure of the actual rankings(too lazy to look them up) I think we are right about where we finished some years with Uncle Brucie at the helm. The OLine is still a weakness probably because of all the injuries we suffered to it,so that's where a lot of the blame for the inconsistency should go. The difference between this year and past years wins and losses are because of physical and even more disheartening mental mistakes that took place on a game to game basis.
There is more than enough blame to go around. Lets just hope that we got rid of the malcontents on this team and we start to fill the voids with smarter and more dedicated FOOTBALL players.

todays NFL is all about just making it to the playoffs and then anything can happen. With all the things that went wrong we were still just a game or even just a play away from getting there. The truth is none of us know what really happens behind closed doors and in the locker room. Even if Haley is to blame for some of it ,you can't deny that what happened between the lines is where it all went wrong. Coaches are supposed to put players in position to succeed and there were plenty of lost opportunities on the field. Yeah there are plenty of mistakes made on the sidelines ,but its the ones made on the field that have the most impact.

 

Do some of us even watch the games? Yeah. I attended 9 of them live last season.

Since you're "too lazy to look them up" . . . no, we weren't "right about where we finished some years with Uncle Brucie at the helm." The year before Haley, in 2011, under BA, we had the 12th-best offense in the NFL (and I posted back then about the defenses we were facing -- we played like 12 games against the top 10 defenses in the league that year). We dropped to 21st under Haley. And, oh, by the way . . . Ben was hurt in 2011, players fumbled, fans cried, we basically had the same players, etc. And, you might want to note that BA took over Indy's offense and took them from 30th to 10th. Of course, that was all Luck and no BA while our substantial drop in performance had to do with everything and everyone except Todd Haley.

In 2010 we were 14th
2009 we were 7th
2008 we were 22nd (and won the Super Bowl with the worst o-line in NFL history)
2007 we were 17th.

You joke about players in the back of their minds thinking "what a Dick that Haley is" but . . . have you ever participated in team sports? Ever played for a coach you didn't like? You check out. My senior year our team just packed it in. We hated our coach. We wanted it to be over. Under BA, the players used to talk about how much fun it was. They liked their coach. It's incomprehensible to me, but people on here actually think that is a bad thing!! Regardless, the camraderie and 'band of brothers' mentality checked out when Haley checked in.

You're right, "coaches are supposed to put players in position to succeed." By all accounts, Haley's system didn't provide for that. The formations, the way he misused personnell . . . he's terrible. I'm the first to hope he turns it around. I'd rather be wrong about him than right about him.

 

i don't dislike bradshaw and i know all about him. he played down here in my backyard at marshall. he's just not the bradshaw of 5 years ago. i just wonder if it's the best use of what little money we have to spend. we saw what his backups, if he's signed here did last year too, and that wasen't much.

i sure hope we get a good draft pick and the O-line improves. someone will have to go though, we won't keep 5 RB's active.

 

With BA at the helm were we ever a top rated offense? With BA at the helm were we ever beating teams to a pulp? The ONLY reason we won Super Bowls while he was here was defense. In 08 we scored 2 defensive tds in the playoffs that kept us in them. Troy sent us to the Super Bowl with a pick 6 of Flacco and take Harrison's pick 6 away and you lose that game too. This revisionist history of the greatness of BA is absolutely ridiculous. If BA were the be all end all the Rooney's would have kept him. It's as if the empty backfields on 3rd and short just never happened. It's as if the complete lack under utilization of Heath just never happened. It's as if when BA was here we just constantly put up 50 and teams around the league were falling all over themselves to be like us. What part of ANY THING I POSTED is NOT a fact? Rankings are stupid and you know it. The Pats have been near the top since 07 but how many Super Bowls have they won since then? Atlanta is one of the top offenses and have nothing to show for it. The bottom line is that Haley kept Ben upright more than BA did and until he got hurt he was gonna have his best season yet. I can stand on facts. At that point in the season when Ben got hurt I bet he had taken far less sacks than at that point in any of BA's time here. It's SO ridiculous to me that you lack the ability to understand that when BA was here Ben was constantly impovising. Why? Because BA's ridiculous bombs away play book contained many plays that took so long to develop and had Ben running for his life. MAN WHAT A GREAT SYSTEM YOU GUYS!!! I love to watch my franchise qb run for his life and get his brains beat out just so our offensive ranking can go up a few notches. The Rooney's knew it was just a matter of time before Ben's luck ran out and they made the decision to not renew BA's contract. Over BA's time here Ben was more sacked than ANY QB IN THE LEAGUE. If you are an owner that's invested in this guy do you bring back the guy who designed the system that put him at such risk? If BA is such a wizard let's just see what he does this year without a super star qb. He's been lucky to hitch his wagon to some guys that made him look a WHOLE lot better than he really is. If not for Ben's ability to overcome the stupidity of BA's playbook we'd have been used to 8-8 by now IF THAT.