JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- The plunge from perfection can be a long, hard one.
But man, how about that bounce off the bottom?
Before the Steelers would wind up writing their own story with the wild 20-16 rally past the Jaguars, believe me, please, that their Sunday afternoon at TIAA Bank Stadium was all about that fall.
They'd been sky-high after pummeling the Panthers back home, and here they were being beaten -- no, beaten up -- by the same opponent whose name they've been spitting since January. Ben Roethlisberger had a perfect 158.3 passer rating against Carolina, and here, late in the second quarter, he was at exactly 8.3. James Conner had been elevated from civic hero to ... well, bigger civic hero, and here he was muffing passes all over the place. The defense, too, had been stacking up mojo points for weeks, only to have Leonard Fournette and three second-string linemen drag them through the mud.
As Mike Tomlin inimitably worded it, “Style points were quite ugly. Or few.”
Except for the ending, of course.
And by that, to be clear, I don't just mean the very ending:
I mean everything that built toward it. And what it could mean beyond all the obvious.
See, it's one thing to shrug off a slow start with a rout of the Falcons. It's another thing to then rip through all three AFC North rivals. And yeah, it sure seemed 'special' to cut down a 6-2 Carolina team by the incredible score of 52-21.
But this one ...
“Horrible games that you find a way to win?" Ben replied when asked to rank this one. "Pretty special.”
"This is different. It's extra special, I'd say," David DeCastro worded it when I asked for a comparison. "You're going to have days when everything's going great, and those are fun. But where you really test yourself is on a day like this. This is where you learn a little about what kind of team you are. This is how you grow. This is where you get better as a team."
T.J. Watt took a shortcut to the same stop: "If we can win this game, we can do a lot of things."
Yep. All of that.
Cuss 'em out for that first half. Punch a pillow, collapse a beer can, whatever. Just about the only thing anyone among the visitors did right was to let Blake Bortles exist and, thus, keep touchdowns to field goals. The Jaguars were up, 9-0, when they should have been up by 30.
But in the same breath, acknowledge this about your football team: With 2:04 remaining in the third quarter, they trailed the Jaguars, 16-0, and had the ball at their own 16-yard line. And they'd go from that to putting up the final 20 for their biggest second-half comeback since Ben's arrival in Pittsburgh.
Acknowledge this, too: Before that drive, Roethlisberger was 10 of 23 for 66 yards with three interceptions, adding up to a 10.1 QB rating. From that drive onward -- and the drive itself was only two plays, one of them a 78-yard touchdown to AB -- and he was 17 of 24 for 249 yards, two touchdowns passing, another rushing, adding up to a 132.2 QB rating. And if you remove one deliberate spike from that surge, it was 137.8.
Oh, and this: Using that same line of demarcation, from when the Jaguars took that 16-0 lead, they gained zero yards in their four full possessions. That's ZERO. As in Z-E-R-O. Four possessions, all three-and-out, including these three Fournette runs on their final series when all that was needed was a first down to win it:
And their final snap from scrimmage, following Roethlisberger's touchdown, resulted in a Watt strip-sack and a Cam Heyward fumble recovery. So make it minus-5 yards.
Sorry, but there's nothing not to love about that.
All the intangibles. So many. So good.
And good for Tomlin for being "really excited" after what he called "a really, really awesome fight." Because it's his enthusiasm that ultimately instills that fight, that spirit that keeps this team in contention year after year after year.
But I'll dig a little deeper here for a couple harder tangibles that might also pay off.
How about JuJu Smith-Schuster, huh?
AB was getting the Jalen Ramsey traveling treatment, with Jacksonville's all-universe corner tailing 84 wherever he lined up. That didn't go well for the Steelers, to put it mildly, with AB catching one of six targets his way and Ramsey pulling off two spectacularly athletic picks. The guy's a bigmouth, and that mouth is owed a punch from everyone employed in the NHL, but he's a breathtaking football player.
Well, in the second half, Randy Fichtner opted to move JuJu out of the slot to escape "all the traffic," as Ben would relay, and put him into position to use his superior size over A.J. Bouye.
That did go well:
That's why Ben referred to JuJu as "kind of the hero today," for that clutch 35-yarder on the critical drive and for his total of eight catches for 104 yards.
It'd be crazy to conceive of some passing of the torch. AB is still AB. But there are certain challenges for which JuJu is clearly better equipped. He's bigger, stronger, and not all the agility in the world from Ramsey could overcome that. He's a different weapon. And maybe, because of both of this game's extremes, we got a chance to see that more fully.
Hey, how about Vance McDonald?
I mean, I could go on and on after investing much of the first half muttering about the lack of throws to tight ends, but here's this instead:
What a grab. What footwork leading to the leap. What awareness to stay in bounds.
What a player that guy's becoming, huh?
One last time just to cleanse it all out: Throw to the tight ends. Especially when the quarterback needs to establish a rhythm.
How about that run defense?
Sure, Fournette was a beast in the first half with 14 carries for 74 yards. But he had the same number of carries in the second half for ... 21 yards?
What changed?
"We played football better," Vince Williams told me. And no one on the defensive side was better than he was the whole way through. "It's not like we figured something out. I mean, he's Leonard Fournette. He's going to run the ball. All we had to do was get through there and make tackles."
No strategic changes at all?
"None."
"Not a thing," Heyward confirmed.
Tomlin had quite a bit to say on this.
"When you’re on the field that much, it tends to erode away at you," he said. "The pile starts to fall forward, or people start to miss tackles. I just thought increasingly as the game went on, there was less of that and it speaks to the character of the group. There were less piles falling forward. There were less missed tackles. It let you know that the group came to play today regardless of circumstances, and I’m thankful for that.”
I thought much the same, even in the first half. Ben and the offense were going three-and-out in a raging hurry, the sun was blaring in 73-degree temps, and the defense kept getting tasked with bullfighting for multiple minutes at a time. The moment that normalized -- some cloud cover came, too -- so did the rest.
That's progress. It really is.
Here's another: How about those adjustments?
I already mentioned the JuJu move, but there also were quality redeployments of Conner after he had a tough time finding traction. Now, he didn't catch the balls that came his way ...
... but that shouldn't take away from the adjustments themselves.
Besides, knowing this kid's personality, those drops will probably spur him to spend every waking hour this coming week catching identical throws:
The more impressive adjustment came on defense, I'll insist, even though Tomlin declined to address Dale Lolley's question on that and even though the players themselves were adamant nothing changed.
Two things changed:
1. Daniel McCullers, who'd been getting rag-dolled right from the start, was benched in favor of much more time for Javon Hargrave, who responded with what might have been his best game in the NFL, two sacks and four tackles.
2. Coty Sensabaugh was replaced at corner by Jordan Dangerfield as a reaction to the Jaguars going single-wideout. Joe Haden could more than handle the latter, so the goal was to go with the better tackler, and Dangerfield's carried that rep for a long time, particularly in drills in Latrobe.
It's easy to wonder why McCullers started in the first place, but it's also fair to rebut that most head coaches are far too stubborn to make a major change like that after having spent several days convincing themselves it was the right thing to do. Full marks to Tomlin for manning up on the mistake at nose tackle. The defense will be better for it.
The Steelers, as a whole, will be better for what happened here. So much more than if they'd just rolled through another Carolina coasting. I believe that.
Infinitely more important, so do they.
"It shows our resilience. Our toughness. Our never-quit attitude. To fight no matter what," Ben would say. "This was one of those games ... our offense, we looked terrible. And that's on me. I'm the quarterback, so that's my fault. But our defense stepped up huge for us. I kept hearing from our defensive guys on their last couple drives, 'All right, Ben! You got this!' They never stopped believing in us. And we believe in them."
He paused.
"So if we get in another situation like this, where one side or the other isn't playing well, we can say, 'Hey, remember that game in Jacksonville?' "
They'd do well not to forget any aspect of it.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Steelers at Jaguars, Jacksonville, Fla., Nov. 18, 2018 - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS