Editor’s Note: The following was written by our newest partner Marc Uhlmann, who writes for and co-owns www.steelcityblitz.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteelDad and the website @SCBlitz. Check us out on Facebook at and on Fancred.com. We are proud to have his radio show as a partner at LWOS. You can hear him weekly during the season on game day on the Trib-Live Radio Steelers Pre-Game and on the SCB Steelers Fan Podcast.
Communication Breakdowns Killing the Steelers
On opening day of the 2014 National Football League regular season in Pittsburgh, the Steelers led their rivals from Cleveland 27-3 at the half. The fans were in a frenzy as they celebrated the offensive and defensive masterpiece.
Then the third quarter started… The Browns came out in the no-huddle, hurry-up offense and shredded the Steelers defense so badly that the Browns came all the way back to tie before Shaun Suisham saved the victory. At a moment when the fans and team should have been talking about a win, they were instead talking about their complete lack of talking.
Mike Tomlin, Dick LeBeau and several players admitted that the communication on defense was lacking and was a major reason as to why the Browns were able to come all the way back.
That lack of communication has apparently not gotten any better.
In the loss on Sunday to Cleveland, the Steelers used a timeout immediately following a timeout by the Browns. There was not one play run in between those back-to-back timeouts either. The Steelers were forced to call timeout after realizing they had 12 men on the field.
How does this happen? This is something I’d expect to see from a pee wee football team not a professional team. What this boils down to is that there is in fact a complete communication failure among the coaches, a communication failure among the players, and of course the failure between the two groups.
Sadly, this isn’t anything new. We’ve seen the Steelers on offense have to use timeouts because personnel groupings did not match the play being called. Yes, these things happen from time to time but they happen far too often in Pittsburgh.
Another example of poor communication was on Sunday when Markus Wheaton and Ben Roethlisberger appeared to be in different stadiums. Wheaton was targeted 11 times but had only four receptions. Some were drops while others were the types of throws where you expect a receiver to go one direction but he goes another.
The game football is often about the little things. Most coaches are sticklers for this type of thing and communication falls into that category.
There really is no excuse for the offense or defense to be having communication issues six games into the season. Somewhere there is a serious lack of attention paid to the ‘little things’ and the Steelers are feeling the negative impact of this problem so far in 2014.
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