Vance McDonald catches the tying touchdown in the fourth quarter Sunday. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS

Steelers

Kovacevic: Testament to team toughness

Nov 12, 2017 • 11:35 pm

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INDIANAPOLIS -- Vance McDonald, all buttoned up to board the Steelers' charter bus, was plodding along Lucas Oil Stadium's lower concourse with a plastic boot on his right leg. The man was miles behind the rest of his mates, behind even Art Rooney II, Kevin Colbert and the better part of the coaching staff.

In this moment, he was passed by Mike Tomlin, too.

"Good job, Vance," the head coach spoke with a nod as he strode by.

"Thanks, Coach," came the hushed, humble reply.

And then, for reasons only he could know, Tomlin stopped, spun around and strode right back.

"What Jesse James did out there today on that field goal ... what you did for us just like that, man, that kind of football is contagious," Tomlin would say. "Think about that. Think about two plays like that happening in the same season. It's awesome. Just awesome."

You know what Tomlin was citing from this 20-17 victory over the Colts ...

... and you surely know what he was citing from McDonald a half-dozen games ago in Chicago:

From that, you might also be aware that, earlier in the week, Tomlin stressed the need for more "splash plays" from the offense and defense, expressing a belief that dramatic, game-altering moments should be the standard for contenders.

So maybe that's what hit him when he spun around. That he'd never foreseen the spectacularly random recurrence of a tight end racing the length of the field following a blocked place kick, accompanied by a punter, to take down the ball carrier just before the goal line.

"Twice now. It's unreal, huh?" James would tell me at his stall. "But you know what? That's what happens when you've got a whole team full of guys who care, guys toughing it out to the very end."

The Steelers have a tight end problem, you've probably heard, and they've had one from the day Heath Miller retired.

They most assuredly don't have a toughness problem, let alone a toughing-it-out-to-the-very-end problem:

McDonald rolled that ankle in kickoff coverage in the second quarter, but no sooner had the press box announcer boomed out his injury status to us scribes -- "right ankle, questionable" -- than McDonald was trotting right back out to the huddle. And he kept playing, taking regular snaps on offense and special teams.

And with 3:08 remaining, maybe because he was still limping and the Colts couldn't take seriously the concept of covering him, he'd take up residence in several acres of open Indiana cornfields to catch the tying touchdown:

Yeah, overall, this was ugly. I watched it, too.

But when the Patriots pull out Ws like this, they're lavished with praise for being some supernatural force that always finds a way. When the Steelers do it, when they overcome a 17-3 deficit in the second half against an NFL opponent -- any NFL opponent, mind you -- our collective reaction will range from complaining to kicking dogs to ... oh, no, did people really try to resurrect that Tomlin-can't-win-on-the-road-against-bad-teams meme? Even though the Steelers are now 7-1 in their past eight such scenarios?

Yuck.

Let's be blunt: We're terrible winners in Pittsburgh, from cradle to grave.

And I get it in this case. The Colts stink. They stink even with everyone healthy, never mind having a bunch of bodies banged up and their franchise quarterback, Andrew Luck, spending this particular weekend in Europe seeking second opinions on the shoulder that his team's doctors have butchered beyond recognition.

The Steelers should have smoked this team. They should have been up by two or three touchdowns at the intermission, run up the score from there, and benefited from resting starters for the short week before the Titans' Thursday night visit to Heinz Field.

But they didn't. Ben Roethlisberger threw up yet another bad deep ball for a pick on his first series. Antonio Brown had two catches at the half and made one of the more glaring drops of his career. Le'Veon Bell was running hard but not far. Ramon Foster went turnstile on the first sack that the offensive line allowed in three games. Chris Boswell, before all the high-fives at the finish, had one kick blocked and banged another off the right bar from 37 bleeping yards. Even the burgeoning defense was being shoved back, conceding one touchdown pass of 60 yards, another of 61, to Luck's ignominious replacement, Jacoby Brissett.

I didn't like it, either. I had and still have questions about all of that.

Sounds like Tomlin does, too.

"There's a lot of negativity to talk about," he said at his postgame podium. "But we'll talk about that negativity with a win, and that's my preference."

Yep. I loved the answer I got to my first question in this locker room that felt anything but dissatisfied with the outcome.

"That bye week, it's ... " David DeCastro began, and I'll spare everyone the bad language that followed. "It just takes you so long to get back into it. Every time."

"You just push through it," Bell told me. "Keep pushing."

That's precisely what they did. Toughness can take many forms on a football field, and this group demonstrated it across the board.

The ball was put in Ben's hands with 3:10 left, 85 yards in front of him and a tied score. The Ben we'd seen through the first half of the season wasn't going to pull this off. The Ben we'd seen through the first half of this game wasn't going to pull this off. But this Ben completed all four passes -- in a five-snap span -- for 66 yards to reach the Indianapolis 18 and set up the clinching kick.

He was outstanding.

What did that sequence tell him about his team's mental makeup?

"That it's strong," Ben replied. "We can face adversity, and we can overcome it."

Adversity might seem a generous term for what Martavis Bryant needs to overcome, given that it's been entirely self-inflicted. But it's still adversity. So, after all his many circuses, further cluttered by barely putting up a battle for Ben's first interception that really should have been a 50/50 ball, it's got to go in the credit column that he caught the tying two-point conversion in the fourth quarter ...

... then a timely 19-yarder to midfield on the decisive drive.

There's some toughness to be unearthed in that.

"I'm just happy it helped us win. I'm happy we won, and I'm happy we made some critical plays there," Bryant said.

Happy?

I had to dig a little deeper there.

"I'm just trying to bring life to the whole team. We went out there and won the game. That makes me happy."

OK.

AB has dug his own share of holes, but the player who went wild on a water cooler in Baltimore was the same one, in this one, who sat on a total of two catches and six targets entering that final drive. Only to see two straight handoffs to Bell. Only to see a first-down catch by Eli Rogers. Only to see Bryant entrusted with the next big play.

Only to basically win the game with this 32-yard romp to the 18:

Watch and listen to this version of AB afterward:

I'm not naive enough to think he's a changed man or something similarly syrupy. But there's at least cause to consider maybe he's grown up a bit.

Say what one will about AB, but he's sixth-round-out-of-Central-Michigan tough.

The defense showed its teeth, too, Brissett had those two touchdowns but, after the second of those, he went 3 of 9 for 20 yards with two of the Steelers' three sacks and Ryan Shazier's pivotal interception. No kidding. Over nearly a half of football.

The secret, as always with this front, is balance. Or, as Bud Dupree hilariously demonstrated for me, it was all about how Brissett was seeing black and gold from all sides:

No doubt, Keith Butler took too long to dial up the blitzes, waiting until after the second time his secondary was scorched. Especially against an opponent that's been sacked 35 times, more than any in the NFL. But they got there, and Dupree, Vince Williams and everyone else pinned back their ears:

No one had more consistent pressure than Cam Heyward -- also, see sky being blue and jaywalking being legal in Pittsburgh -- but Tuitt was the one bouncing back from a wave of injuries that had cost him much of the season. He was credited with one sack, but he had another nullified by a defensive holding penalty in the secondary, in addition to three tackles-for-loss and four quarterback hits.

"Steph was so, so good," Heyward told me.

His smile strongly suggested he concurred:

This marked the first game of 2017 in which the Steelers had all 22 of the guys at the top of the depth chart healthy. Be very sure Tuitt's return represents more than 1/22 of that equation.

By the time this was done, Joe Haden had a fractured fibula, and McDonald was joined in a walking boot by Mike Mitchell, who's got a bum ankle. Haden's got no chance to play Thursday, and the other two have close to no chance, from what I heard. Which means that, when the Steelers will face a surprising 6-3 Tennessee team, they might need some extra-sharp claws.

That's kind of how this football process works.

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY

Steelers vs. Colts, Indianapolis, Nov. 12, 2017. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS

WHAT'S BREWING?

• The Steelers' short week will shorten our own, of course. That's why tried to cram as much coverage -- seven full articles, a video and a photo gallery -- into one day, so that we, like the team itself, can turn our attention to Tennessee almost immediately. So the rhythm might feel a little different the next couple days, beginning with Tomlin's Monday press conference.

• Trying to ramp up our video offerings from the scene of sporting events, we've gone with a full Steelers Postgame program -- all three of us at Lucas Oil Stadium, plus interviews with the players -- that we really hope you'll like. Morning Java will resume Tuesday and all the rest of the weekdays, as ever.

• There's a sport played in the Harry Potter films called quidditch. Through some form of sorcery, quidditch arrived in Pittsburgh over the weekend. Only our Long Hong could cast so strong a spell as to capture readership for this! But he shall!

• The second of Taylor Haase's Wilkes-Barre Watch contributions meets the high bar of her first. Only this time, it's got one of my favorite Penguins prospects -- great kid -- in Dominik Simon. Also, remember that she's now doing a Wheeling Watch on Tuesdays. Because hockey.

• Over the weekend, we had an outstanding PNC Main Street Meetup here in Indianapolis, where Dale Lolley, Christopher Carter, Matt Sunday and I had the pleasure of meeting subscribers, buying coffee and handing out free Steelers merchandise brought from Pittsburgh by PNC's Pat Boston. We'll do it again soon on the road, this time before a Penguins game!

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