Josh Scobee blew the Steelers' two best chances to beat -- no, bury -- the winless Ravens with two missed field goals late in what wound up a 23-20 overtime loss Thursday night at Heinz Field. The snaps were fine, the holds were firm, there was barely a breeze and, heck, they'd even cemented off the Dreaded Open End with the stadium's summer expansion.
So there's no one to fault here beyond Scobee. It's fair and it's right.
Check that. It's left ...
As one might imagine, it was an uncomfortable scene around Scobee afterward. While he stood at his stall and faced multiple waves of cameras and microphones -- and I mean everyone rushed toward him when the doors opened -- several members of the defensive secondary sat silently in the same corner of the locker room when, suddenly, Mike Mitchell screamed something unintelligible. Scobee, in maybe his only showing of cool all night, continued speaking without hesitation.
But afterward, when the place had all but cleared out, he sat alone. Head in hands. No clothing but for the white towel wrapped about his waist.
He's 33, he's in his 12th NFL season, and he's been through a bunch. But it's safe to say none of the shanks in Jacksonville stung like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ey4Zaulqto
But no one wants to hear that. And again, that's fair and right. Because the cold facts are that Scobee has been terrible. He's missed 4 of 10 field goals as well as a PAT since replacing the replacement of Shaun Suisham, and he's clearly lost his coach's confidence.
That was first evident when Mike Tomlin decided he'd rather rip his own molars from his mouth than let Scobee take another shot in overtime.
And it was evident again when Tomlin, who'd barked out "Yes!" when one of us reporters asked Sunday in St. Louis if he still had faith in his kicker, responded this way to the same question after this game: "We have to turn the stones over. We have to find ways to win games. Obviously, that's an element of the outcome tonight."
Obviously.
Just as obviously, Scobee should be job-hunting by sunrise. He's no longer got any business on this roster or maybe any other in the league. He looks finished.
But here's what else was equally obvious: Tomlin misfired a ton more than Scobee on this night, even if he wasn't offering anything more than the standard superficial accountability.
See, it wasn't Scobee who failed to address what would become this game's signature facet, that being the Ravens' running game. Justin Forsett totaled 150 yards on 27 carries -- only six shy of Joe Flacco's passing attempts -- and somehow he only grew stronger as the game progressed in getting 105 of those after halftime.
I asked James Harrison if Baltimore had done anything special in this regard.
"They just played better than we did," Harrison replied, snapping off each syllable. "They made plays. We didn't."
I asked the two inside linebackers the same.
"It's really just that they made the plays," Sean Spence said. "We didn't."
"They made plays," Lawrence Timmons said. "We didn't."
Loose translation: Nothing changed schematically. Which, by the way, it didn't.
Even though Flacco was working without his top two wide receivers -- he joked afterward that the receivers he had in the fourth quarter were "some guys I knew from early in training camp" -- and even though the Steelers' pass rush was healthy whether they blitzed or not, no adjustment was made to fortify the middle. As a result, Forsett ran and ran and ran.
Steelers
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John Harbaugh
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Steve McLendon
Cam Thomas
Cam Heyward
Keith Butler
Michael Vick
Ben Roethlisberger
Antonio Brown
Steve Smith Sr
Todd Haley
not
Heath Miller
Sammie Coates
Will Davis
Darrius Heyward-Bey
Le'Veon Bell
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