Kovacevic: Seriously, why is Landry still thrust into this spot?

Oct 18, 2016 • 12:54 am

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MIAMI -- Brief and to the Point ...

The Steelers will be right to start Landry Jones against the Patriots.

And yet, they'll be equally wrong.

They'll be right in the context that Jones is the best equipped. He's performed daily out of the Todd Haley playbook for three years, a huge edge over Zach Mettenberger's one month. Because of that, the Xs and Os won't be limited, at least not by familiarity, and there will be a deep knowledge of his teammates' tendencies.

What's more, Jones has been Ben Roethlisberger's primary backup in all practices, while Mettenberger has worked exclusively with the scout team, meaning he mimics the quarterback of the coming week's opponent.

So fine. Landry has to start. And he will.

My broader-scope question is this: Why did it come to this?

If we're all being completely candid here, Mike Tomlin doesn't trust Jones any further than Jones could throw himself. They've demonstrated that time and time again, and not just after interception-packed preseason games. When Roethlisberger was felled last year, Jones wasn't the choice to replace him. Michael Vick was. Even in this most recent camp, when Bruce Gradkowski reported with a bum shoulder pretty much everyone knew would shelve him, he was still seen as the most likely backup had he somehow gotten healthy.

Heck, I wonder if the Steelers even see Jones as a viable No. 3!

But out he'll go Sunday afternoon to take on Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and the Patriots, a matchup that should have meant to much to the Steelers and now essentially is flattened into a forfeit.

I ask again: Why?

Why would Tomlin, Kevin Colbert and the entire front office drag Jones along for long in any role, much less one in which he's required to replace the living embodiment of the franchise?

Are they seriously waiting for him to mature into the next Charlie Batch?

That, my friends, will happen in Two-Thousand-And-Never.

Batch was a bona fide NFL quarterback. Gradkowski was, too, to a lesser degree. Glance around the league, and you'll find a whole lot more of those Brian Hoyer/Jimmy Garoppolo/Geno Smith types then you will of failed fourth-round eternal projects.

Remember this the next time the Steelers preach accountability. They love to talk about it after games. But the winning has to happen all year-round, and all they've done for far too long is punt when it comes to the most important depth chart on the roster.

• No, I'm not done with this yet. It blows my mind in every way that a contending NFL team, one that's carrying a starting quarterback who's 34 years old, can't prioritize a No. 2 quarterback. There are only 16 games. It's almost a certainty entering the season that Roethlisberger will miss 2-3 games. If it's four games, that's a quarter of the schedule.

If you showed Colbert and/or Tomlin definitive data that they'd likely miss a starting linebacker or defensive end for a quarter of the schedule each year, they'd snap-of-a-finger commit an additional $10 million to those positions in cap space. Maybe $50 million!

But a quarterback?

Eh. Let's try Russian roulette.

• Jones has won one NFL start. Mettenberger is 0-10 as a starter. The Steelers found this to be acceptable.

• Never again underestimate how much Cam Heyward means to this defense. The Dolphins didn't overthink anything Sunday: They found the hole where No. 97 used to stand and jackhammered away.

Even Stephon Tuitt didn't look the same, at the other end, undoubtedly trying to compensate.

"We didn't play well enough," Tuitt would say afterward in a hushed tone. "That's it. No excuses."

Yeah, sorry, big guy, but the Standard was on the sideline in this instance. No one's replacing him.

• No one with the team could or should ever utter a syllable to this effect, but nothing's stopping me: Rest the injured guys this weekend. Get them well. The bye week follows, along with a whole lot of bad teams. That's when to rise up anew.

• Roethlisberger doesn't like pain. He talks about it openly.

As he said of his non-surgically-repaired right knee Sunday, the one hit by a helmet on the final series, "It's got a bruise. That'll feel great in the morning."

Some in the sports world hate that kind of talk. They think it's less than tough.

I'll take the quarterback who plays an entire half of football on a torn meniscus.

• Know who else famously did a ton of complaining about his day-to-day health?

Roberto Clemente.

Look it up. He was ripped for it, too, on a regular basis.

All the way to exactly 3,000 hits.

• Special nod to Big Dan McCullers for that field-goal block. We'd all have been raving about it had the Steelers rallied back, but it was no less impressive that he got the push he did to get that forearm up.

Problems defending the run?

Try plugging the middle with the 6-8, 300-pound dude a little more often. This one participated in only eight of 55 defensive snaps.

• NFL ratings are down 11 percent from a year ago, and there's suddenly a rush to plant flags in the island, if you will, to explain it.

One that's stunningly gaining traction is that Colin Kaepernick's various national anthem hi-jinx are turning fans off to the NFL in general.

Oh, that's a real thing. And it's what I like to call the faux protest. It's not unlike when someone angrily claims they'll never vote for someone they weren't going to vote for anyway. It's just convenient to hit one thing to the other.

The real issue, at least for this perspective, is much more boring: The NFL has spread to too many days and lost that sense of any particular game being a destination event. Even Sunday nights on NBC, which draw the highest ratings of any program on TV, are feeling increasingly ... oh, Colts vs. Texans.

Kill Thursday night games, and all will be well.