Kovacevic: Steelers ready for big-time reset

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Ben Roethlisberger's face scrunched up like a saturated prune as a bunch of us reporter types surrounded his locker stall late Sunday afternoon inside Arrowhead Stadium, and I was fairly certain I knew why.

The Steelers' 23-13 flat-lined flop against the previously 1-5 Chiefs?

That had to be part of it. The franchise quarterback had just been stuck on the sideline for a fourth game with the injured left knee, helpless while watching third-stringer -- or is it fourth-stringer -- Landry Jones try in vain to carry his water.

But there sure seemed to be more.

Roethlisberger had dressed in a raging hurry, draped on his coat and began wheeling his luggage out just as our armada invaded. Reluctantly but politely, he paused a moment to take a couple questions.

How close had he come to playing in this game?

"Pretty close. It felt pretty close."



Does he think he'll be back for the first-place Bengals next week?

"That's the coach's call. I hope so."

He then wheeled that luggage forward again, bracing as if he were about to take down Terrell Suggs, but was stopped again. His grimace grew more pronounced. His eyes clamped up.

"I'll see you this week, guys."

Yeah, that sounded more like it. Not the statement itself, necessarily, but the surliness with which it was delivered and with which the luggage finally rolled away. See, when Roethlisberger's idle, he can be all kinds of folksy and chummy. But when he's ready for football, he gets a little foul.

He's ready.

And, at least from this view, so are the Steelers as a collective.

'THERE'S UGLY ... AND THERE'S UGLY'

I strongly suspect that holding high expectations for this team won't be a common stance back home. And that's eminently understandable in the moment.

Cam Heyward called this loss "deeply disappointing."

Mike Mitchell called it "really tough."

Lawrence Timmons called it "one you want to forget in a hurry."

Notice that all those guys play on the same side of the ball.

Jones, making his first NFL start, was supposed to lose this game, if anyone would. But he really didn't. He completed 16 of 29 passes for 209 yards, he threw one interception that was wholly his fault and another that was twice tipped, and he tossed the sweetest of strikes to Martavis Bryant for this third-quarter touchdown:



"Man," Bryant said, "what a throw that was."

Jones isn't a fraction of the quarterback Roethlisberger is, but he "gave us a chance," as Mike Tomlin would say. The Steelers were down by only 16-13 after that Bryant touchdown and Chris Boswell's fourth-quarter field goal, and they were finally moving the ball with some conviction.

"I thought we had a chance," Tomlin said. "I felt good about it."

He should have. Because the game at that point was handed to the defense. Going against an offense that's lousy at its very best, that much less without Jamaal Charles, Jeremy Maclin, and, really, any NFL-caliber wide receivers.

So the Chiefs took the ball and stormed 84 yards on eight plays for the game-sealing touchdown.

"Those plays really hurt us down the stretch," Jarvis Jones said. "We needed to get off the field, and we just didn't do it."

Not in any facet, to rub it in. Alex Smith, the living embodiment of ordinary in the NFL, completed 21 of 32 dinks for 251 yards, was sacked only twice and wasn't intercepted. Chris Conley caught six of his seven targets for 63 yards, matched mostly against Antwon Blake, and achieved one of the great rarities in football by being a Kansas City wide receiver with a touchdown catch. Charcandrick West did his best Jamaal impersonation by rushing 22 times for 110 yards.

And that all came with one constant.

"All those missed tackles," Robert Golden said. "Missed tackles always hurt."

In this case, they hurt again and again and again.

"There's ugly, and then there's ugly," Heyward said. "Losing a game on missed tackles ... that's ugly. That's hard to take."

'WE KNOW WHAT WE HAVE'

Come next Sunday, when the clouds part and the angels play their harps high above Heinz Field and Roethlisberger's name is the last called out with the offensive introductions, these Steelers will emerge from the tunnel a Super Bowl contender.

I mean this.

Even if Heyward wanted no part of any such talk in the immediate aftermath:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4PD-BBwIvo

Good for him. Fool's gold, indeed.

But that doesn't make it any less likely.

The Steelers are 4-3, which isn't the stuff of blaring headlines, but in the astonishingly mediocre AFC, that's actually the fifth-best record. It also doesn't look too promising trailing the Bengals' 6-0 in the AFC North, but I'll take Cincinnati seriously only after Marvin Lewis wins a playoff game or mankind sets foot on Mars, whichever comes first. A year ago, the Bengals had the division all wrapped up right until they didn't. And the footsteps they least want to hear behind them are the same now as then.

There are two head-to-head meetings to come, the first in Pittsburgh.

"That could be fun," Timmons said. "It's tough to think about right now, but it could."

The reason for L.T.'s hesitancy to get too excited about anything was this:



This was a bad game for tackling, but that's hardly a recurring issue. It will be fixed. What doesn't ever seem to get fixed, not this season or any other, is the maddening inability to cover a quality pass-catching tight end.

Smith's ball on that play lands in the able arms of Travis Kelce, the one Kansas City player everyone knew could burn the Steelers if only because he's a tight end. And sure enough, coming off the line, he was left in single coverage with Timmons, as we've seen countless times in recent years.

To be blunt, Timmons got beat.

"My guy all the way," he said. "I didn't make the play."

Right. But neither did anyone else. Nor was there any extra effort schematically to address the most meaningful threat on the field.

If it happens once, no big deal. If it happens for a decade ... well, wait till you see this Tyler Eifert kid the Bengals have.

Otherwise, at the risk of sweeping a little dust under the rug such as newbie left tackle Alejandro Villanueva getting beaten twice for sacks, I'm honestly not seeing much about these Steelers to not like. They're deeper than they've been in years on offense, and all the weapons are finally at hand. They're tougher and more talented than they've been in years on defense. They're not brilliantly coached, but it's generally good enough.

And when that 4-3 record gets mentioned, it shouldn't at any point go underappreciated that they went 2-2 without Roethlisberger, without Bruce Gradkowski and with maybe the worst QB in the league in Michael Vick and Jones the third-year clipboard holder.

"We wanted more. We wanted this one," Ramon Foster said. "But we know what we have. We stood tall through this. We held it together. And now with Ben coming back, everything we've done without him, add all that and all the other guys we didn't have early on ... man, we're ready to take off."