BALTIMORE -- The visitors’ locker room at M&T Bank Stadium is among the NFL’s least inviting, its smallish square space split in half by a bank of tall, dank wooden stalls. The divided design’s no accident, either. It’s one of the oldest competitive ploys in organized sport, with the intent being to physically and, thus, psychologically keep the home team's opponent from connecting with each other.
Players hate the place. They pack up and bolt here faster than I’ll see them do it anywhere. Seriously, even Antonio Brown rushes into full peacock-scale attire and bee-lines it to the bus.
Not this time.
The Steelers’ 23-16 repelling of the archrival Ravens on this sunny Sunday afternoon had long since ended, and this room had long since emptied but for some strewn equipment, a bunch of rolled-up balls of tape, one custodian cleaning all that up ... and one human wrecking ball still sitting at his tall wooden stall. Staring straight into it.
“James Conner!”
The booming voice, unmistakably that of an urgent Mike Tomlin, came from a nearby hallway.
Then again.
Conner didn’t budge either time.
Finally, the coach strode authoritatively into the room, looked to his left, saw his starting running back, fresh off yet another superlative performance — arguably his finest, actually, with 163 all-purpose yards against the league’s No. 1 defense — and froze in his tracks, waiting for Conner to look back.
A couple seconds passed, and Conner did look over.
And their eyes locked.
And after no more than an additional couple seconds, Tomlin gave Conner a simple, silent nod. We all know the one.
Conversation over.
____________________
Show me a team that can break down its internal barriers, one that's building a collective confidence to match its skill level, and I’ll show you a team that can and will get better.
But show me a team that can do things that the other guys legitimately can’t stop, even if it's just a few things ... and I’ll show you a team that just might be headed somewhere special.
I loved how Tomlin worded it when asked after this, the Steelers' fourth win in a row and one that solidified anew their command of the AFC North at 5-2-1, about his team's resiliency: “I just think the further we go down this journey, the tape is the storyteller. If we’re doing what we’re supposed to do, they need no endorsement from me. You see it. It should jump at you off the tape.”
Yeah, that's it. It's about what jumps off the tape.
In fact, that thought meshed perfectly with so many of my own while watching this from the press box, enough that it felt like a worthwhile exercise to come up with a handful -- no, a fistful, given these guys' punch of late -- of ways in which the Steelers are flat-out imposing their will. Meaning, as mentioned above, things that the other guys legitimately can't stop.
Buckle up ...
1. James Conner
These won't be in any particular order except for this one. This is a bona fide No. 1.
Conner can be tackled, of course, so he can be stopped. But it's seldom achieved by a single defender, as powerfully, sometimes painfully illustrated again Sunday in rushing for 107 of those 163 all-purpose yards, including this slice of pure football poetry below:
No, I won't release the names of the Ravens' fallen until the next of kin are notified. But suffice it to say they'll be added to the longest such list in the NFL, as Conner has now officially broken 49 tackles, most in the league by a mile, with three more in this game. There can't be any higher stature for a running back. Not total yardage. Not touchdowns. Because it's the one trait to the job that isolates on the back alone.
He also breaks big runs (eight now of 20-plus yards), catches the ball (seven more on nine targets for 56 yards), creates his own offense (more on that next), picks up blitzes and, presumably just to amuse himself on the side, inspires his teammates.
"James is showing that no challenge is too big for him," Alejandro Villanueva was telling me. "You know, when you're so close to him, when you see him lower his shoulder to get a couple extra yards, it's extremely motivating."
Opponents are ganging up on the run. Nobody had done it better, if one recalls, than these Ravens, when John Harbaugh was so hell-bent on eliminating Conner that he stacked his box to the tune of 19 yards on nine carries.
It no longer matters.
"He's running from the heart," Maurkice Pouncey told me. "He's the fuel for our fire."
Oh, and Conner's a civic treasure. He was that long before any of this.
No, he's not Le'Veon Bell. He's better. In football and in every walk of life. Let's stop being afraid to say it.
2. The offensive line
Let's not shy away from this, either: The Steelers might have the NFL's best offensive line.
There's no firm way to support that statistically, so I'll settle for this: Bell was the NFL's No. 3 rusher in 2017, and Conner is the NFL's No. 2 rusher right now, trailing the Rams' Todd Gurley.
Conner himself is the first to praise the common denominator therein, as he did yet again.
“Every game they come out with an attitude and try to dominate. They bring energy every week," he'd say of his line. "They were great on that drive to start the second half. We marched right down the field and used up eight minutes off the clock. It was huge to get points off that drive.”
That was the Steelers' 15-play, 75-yard procession after halftime, one-third of which were runs, including another Ben Roethlisberger sneak to finish it.
Tomlin, too, has gone out of his way to point to the line.
“I don’t want to take anything away from James," he'd reply to a question that had been solely about Conner, "but the big boys up front are opening up holes, and so it’s a collective effort."
The man who buys them steak dinners brings that praise, too.
"Those guys were fantastic," Roethlisberger said. "And they did it against the No. 1 defense in the NFL."
I could single out any of countless conventional running plays that benefited from above-and-beyond blocking, but this one's more fun:
Everything with this play went wrong until Conner smartly went from being Roethlisberger's safety valve to bolting over the middle. None of that was supposed to happen. It's incredible improv by both.
But none of it comes close to happening without Villanueva holding off the great Terrell Suggs once, twice, then a third time -- left edge of the line -- not to mention Ramon Foster on Brandon Williams and everyone else holding their own blocks for an eternity, punctuated by David DeCastro coming back to knock poor Tyus Bowser on his purple derriere there at the end.
Where's the defensive front that'll beat this line?
What's stopping this group?
It sure isn't any alleged distractions. Because unlike a lot of others on this team, the line stood tall and told it like it is regarding Bell. DeCastro continued that trend after this one, too.
“Honestly, no one cares anymore," one of the NFL's very best guards came right back at a question about Bell. "Why would I? I don’t want to waste the energy. I have to block some of the best players on the best defenses in the world. Do you think I’m going to worry about a guy who’s not here?"
3. JuJu Smith-Schuster
It looks like the same play every time. It isn't, as I'd confirm with JuJu, but maybe the similarity is simply the result: He'll flash across the middle, maybe for no more than a split-second, and Roethlisberger will fire into his long, strong arms in a handoff that might as well be a baton relay.
Remember the old Kordell Stewart aerial plunge into the end zone that was playfully dubbed 'The Unstoppable Play?'
Well, this one's getting there: Ben-to-JuJu accounted for three of the Steelers' 10 successful third-down conversions out of 16 such situations, in addition to a vital one on fourth-and-1 late in the game that brought a 6-yard catch. Same quick slant almost every time.
"Honestly, we've been working on this for a while," JuJu told me with a shrug. "But the truth is, you've got to win on first and second downs. That makes third downs easy."
He's right. Most of the Steelers' third-down conversions came on 5 yards or less.
Not this one below, though. It wasn't third down, and it wasn't even Ben at the helm:
Lay it on thick for Josh Dobbs. That's a bullet on second-and-20 from the Pittsburgh 5. That was storybook stuff, too, firing his first NFL pass from under his own goal post for a big first down, and I'd love to have invested this whole column in the conversation we had:
Great kid. But the kid at the other end -- and JuJu's a year younger at 21, by the way -- is making those plays effortlessly. And that's one whale of a weapon for an offensive coordinator, even as it's a defensive coordinator's nightmare.
At the least, it'll linger in the Ravens' nightmares all through their coming bye week, based on how many of them bemoaned it after this.
"You're not going to win much in football if you're not getting off the field when you should," safety Tony Jefferson said. "They made plays."
4. Cam Heyward, Stephon Tuitt
The Steelers' defense wound up with two sacks, which has got to be at least a little disappointing considering the Ravens were without both their starting offensive tackles. It should have been, theoretically, open season on Joe Flacco.
Thing is, though, it still kind of was. Flacco was hit six times and rushed repeatedly. Beyond that, as Harbaugh and Flacco both acknowledged afterward, the Baltimore game plan had been altered dramatically to accommodate the tackles' absence and the Steelers' defensive line.
"When we did get into the seven-step or even the five-step stuff, Joe was under duress," Harbaugh said. "We were trying to get the ball out quick and run the ball in various formations. Obviously, a lot of the Lamar stuff was a big part of that."
Lamar Jackson, he meant, the rookie quarterback who was bouncing on and off the field in some attempt to keep the Steelers off-balance. It all failed. The passing, the running, the Lamar stuff, all of it amounted to 23:31 of possession time and an offense that, if not for a litany of dubious pass interference flags, might as well have been in stasis.
That started up front with Heyward and Tuitt.
Neither had eyepopping numbers, Cam with a tackle assist and two QB hits, Stephon with just a sack. But they took double-teams a good portion of the game and, as a result, Alex Collins was held to 35 yards rushing, because blockers couldn't be spared for the scheme. Moreover, Flacco was a mess, with more than half of his 14 incompletions being utter misfires "under duress," as Harbaugh phrased it.
Here, watch the Tuitt sack, this on the Ravens' final drive with a chance to tie:
Tuitt overwhelmed Marshal Yanda, the right guard wearing No. 73, and that's not exactly one of the fill-ins. Yanda's among the most respected offensive linemen in the league. Tuitt blows by him wide, keeps his feet churning even as Flacco is forced from the pocket, then claws away at his arm with one of those pterodactyl wings.
Now, watch it again, but now on Heyward just to Tuitt's right. They're the only two down linemen on a four-man front, flanked by outside linebackers T.J. Watt and Bud Dupree. Heyward drives his man, left guard Alex Lewis, the left guard wearing No. 72, right back into Flacco's face. This blows up everything well before Tuitt had arrived on the scene.
"I'm happy to do my part," Heyward told me. "I'm happier still that we made the play."
I told Tuitt of Heyward's role and, fresh off the field, he'd had no idea.
"But it doesn't surprise me," he said. "Cam was driving 'em back all day."
Great grin to go with that, I should add:
They do that driving back, these two. And no, they haven't always. Jacksonville still stings them both, as it should. But they've looked like that sequence above far more often than not, and they also aren't being stopped.
5. Joe Haden
He's definitely not last in priority. However, it's fun to save him for last in this exercise, if only because there isn't enough footage of him making plays. No highlights. No nothing.
Here, Matt Sunday snapped this pretty cool shot of him on the bench:
Otherwise, it's best to trust what one's eyes do not tell them, and presume that there's a reason quarterbacks, including Flacco, don't throw his way. In this one, John Brown, Baltimore's best receiver, was held to three catches for 17 yards.
That's three, as in, you know ... three.
In the teams' previous meeting at Heinz Field, Brown had three catches, too, but for 116 receiving yards, a 33-yard touchdown and a 71-yard completion.
Brown was asked what the Steelers did differently this time, and his response was sublime: "Joe Haden followed me. They basically took me out of the game plan."
My friend, those two things have become one and the same.
Never mind that Haden wanted nothing to do with being singled out, saying, "We tried to keep Brown in the box and not let him get over the top like he did last time. We paid a lot more attention to him." Haden did get safety help on the deep routes, but he was mostly being humble. This was all him. He’d be targeted only five times the whole game, allowing two completions for 35 yards .
The most valuable aspect of what the Steelers' defensive MVP -- he'd be my whole-team MVP if not for Conner -- brings is that he allows the other 10 men on the field to not worry about the most dangerous threat.
Think about that.
"What Joe does is take care of his business, which is big business," was how Vince Williams termed it for me. "He's a star. And he's been a star in this league for a long time. This isn't some emergence."
Who in the NFL has an answer for Haden?
____________________
Maybe Tomlin's contact with Conner in that locker room meant little. Maybe he really just wanted to get that bus rolling. Short week and all. Carolina's coming to town Thursday night.
I think it meant quite a bit. I do.
This coach will wing it with some matters but not with message-sending. Trust me, he wasn't winging it hours before kickoff, on an ESPN interview he knew would be seen far and wide by the full football universe, when he spoke this regarding Conner and Bell: "We need volunteers, not hostages."
Oh, my.
But wait. Well afterward, when Foster congratulated Dobbs, his fellow Tennessee alum, on Twitter, the comeback might have told a little too much:
.@RamonFoster I agree man. Pretty cool. Not to mention @CoachTomlin saying pregame that he wants VOLUNTEERS!??? https://t.co/38ZBymDzEy
— Josh Dobbs (@josh_dobbs1) November 5, 2018
So Tomlin used that line to the team, as well?
Ow.
Hey, he knows. They all know. And not just about Conner or Bell. They all know what they're starting to do. And how some of what they're doing can't be sufficiently countered.
At the same time, they're staying ... would you believe humble?
I mean, if AB, of all people, is staying humble when I ask about imposing one's will ...
... then that's a team trending very much in the right direction. Because they really can get better.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Steelers at Ravens, Baltimore, Nov. 4, 2018 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS