Playing down to competition?

Lol!!!

 

It actually was. I can remember being livid about losing games we should have won in those days too. The only thing is though that it didn't seem like we did it with the consistent frequency that we do it now and also we didn't always have a franchise qb and the best wr and rb in the game either. I honestly believe if we could even field a middle of the pack defense that we could be a truly lethal team.

 

Yeah, there my be some deficiencies there, but overall IMO he does a good job with the leadership part. He just needs to work on preparation and game management.

 

Yes, as far as this year goes. But we play down to competition that's lesser as a whole. Last year? Tampa Bay. The Aints. The Browns. The Jets. A 27-24 win vs the Titans.

It's incongruent, because Mike Tomlin preaches mental toughness and is himself a confident no-nonsense sounding guy... But he takes his foot off the gas when he's up (30-27 Browns, 2014) and loses to unbelievably bad teams.

This year it costed us the season; maybe (maybe) we've learned this time?

Really it's dissapointing because this seemed like one of those years with some magic in it.

 

That statement in itself is profound. Nicely stated.

 

That darn Ben Rothelisberger loves playing down to the competition. Any critisim of Tomlin will fall on the shoulders of Ben. HC's and QB's successes and failures are one in the same.

Seriously, one issue is fans believe the Steelers are a superior team in comparison to the competition. That's simply not the case. I don't believe in this idea of playing down to the level of the competition at the professional level. Especially considering there's so much parity in the league today. All teams have the talent to compete. When the team with the better record makes mistakes (turnovers) the teams with the losing records can win. It happens all the time.

I'd bet money that most of those losses happened because the Steelers turned the ball over.

 

Maybe we are not actually playing "down to competition" because we are a lot closer to the "down competition" than we want to believe. We are not a weak team, but we probably are a mediocre team with decent upside... And have been for the past several years now. We didn't play down to our competition in 2004, 2005, 2008, or 2010. That's because we fielded good teams those years. Good teams don't consistently play down to competition, look around the league. Sure, good teams stumble everyone once in a while, but it's not a repeating pattern or trend like it has been with us over the past several years. Good teams are good teams because they consistently beat the teams they are supposed to beat. We don't... And we haven't for a while. I just think this is an inconsistent group that is above average, but probably not more than that.