FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Donte Moncrief whisked the windbreaker over his head faster than he'd run any route all Sunday night. The hood was up, too. Phone in one hand, travel bag in the other.
And no, wise guy, he didn't drop either.
At least not that I'd witnessed on his slow walk to the team bus, where, yes, he was still somehow allowed to board after the Steelers' stomach-turning 33-3 season-opening loss to the Patriots at Gillette Stadium, one in which he'd been targeted 10 times by Ben Roethlisberger for a total of three catches and 7 yards.
A half-dozen drops.
Dear God, I really typed that. Heck, it really happened:
I mean, poor Limas Sweed remains synonymous with drops among the Nation, a decade after committing fewer drops in his cameo NFL career than Moncrief did in these three hours.
And yeah, I did catch up with him at his stall -- heck, everyone was able to catch up with him on the field -- to ask about it:
At least he didn't drop the ball in terms of accountability. He did reply with the general "we" as if a whole bunch of people had been equally butter-fingered, saying, "We just weren't on the same page tonight. We've got to get the timing down." But he did stand there for a few more minutes, too, patiently fielding variations of that same question.
Besides, I'm not here to single out anyone, much less scapegoat. Of the 46 players the Steelers suited up, all 45 of them not named T.J. Watt ranked somewhere between abysmal and below-average, from this press box perspective.
As Cam Heyward worded it, "There were a lot of mistakes, and that falls on us. We didn't execute well. And when you do that versus a Super Bowl-winning team, that performance isn't good enough."
Nope. Not close.
So I'm isolating on Moncrief for a very different reason. It's not just that he didn't come back for the football. It's not that his hands went soft-tissue when it arrived. It's not that, even though Bill Belichick left him wide open by artistic design, he couldn't carve out open space with any conviction.
No, it's because this was the highest level of artistic design by Mike Tomlin and Randy Fichtner to try to produce the Steelers' first points of the evening after conceding the first 20:
Fade to Moncrief.
A flipping Plax-style fade to Moncrief, who'd put forth four drops on his first five targets to that point and, on this one, ran toward the pylon when Roethlisberger needed him to turn toward the sideline. And yet, in this moment, with the team in dire need of six points, he was the choice again ... because Belichick had decided to take away the other options.
That, my friends, is how a team, from the head coach down, behaves when it's afraid.
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There was an opportunity lost. Maybe it wasn't beating the champs. Maybe even the Steelers' best wouldn't have achieved that. It certainly doesn't feel that way now.
But I'd been writing for weeks that there was one non-injury worst-case scenario, and that's that they'd show up here for their first game without Antonio Brown and lay an absolute egg offensively. Because in that event, they'd make no real stride toward forming their post-AB identity, particularly in the passing game. And if that were to happen, I argued, they'd be set back big-time.
Don't forget, offense is still what this is all about.
The defense flashed some upside, notably in the first half, and Devin Bush had a decent NFL debut with a team-high 11 tackles, including seven solos. They'd eventually get blown up by Tom Brady, but there's ample precedent for that sort of thing. They'll get it together on their end soon enough. I believe that.
But Roethlisberger's the franchise until the day he isn't, and JuJu Smith-Schuster's the roster's No. 1 star on the rise, with James Conner having breathed some of that same air at times in 2018. As a result of that and an experienced offensive line, the offense still needs to be the separator. It still needs to be what's special.
And this ... this was a joke. All of it. From a first half that wrought four first downs, 87 total yards and one brief poke across midfield, to 20 overall incomplete passes, to 32 overall rushing yards, to 3-of-12 conversion on third downs to ... oh, you saw it.
And it began, I dare say, with an embarrassingly passive ... no, fearful approach.
The head coach, whose countless pet lines include "I don't live in my fears," might as well have spent this one hiding under a blanket. The final call is his, both on the broader game plan and on specific play calls and adjustments, so it's Tomlin -- much more than Fichtner or Roethlisberger -- who should bear the brunt of this.
This game plan was built not on respect for Belichick but on being outright afraid of him.
The whole football world knew, for example, that Stephon Gilmore would cover JuJu. It was equally known that Gilmore would have loads of help, as that's the Belichick blueprint: Pinpoint the one opponent who can hurt the Patriots the most, and eliminate him from the equation.
All of that, of course, occurred.
Tomlin's counter was to ... surrender. There's simply no kinder way to describe Roethlisberger targeting JuJu twice in the first half. Twice. Both were catches, totaling 26 yards, and that was it. No effort was made to try different looks, different routes, maybe an end-around to capitalize on his superior athleticism, maybe one of those trademark quick slants he's been able to break for big splash. Not a damned thing beyond two routine targets.
Why?
Because Belichick decreed that's how it'd be.
JuJu finished with six catches for 78 yards, which disguises the impact made when the game was still a game. And befitting his personality, he didn't complain.
"We all need to be better," he'd say.
The whole football world knew, additionally, that Roethlisberger loves to find his tight end in times of trouble. Which meant Plan B would likely be not one of the other wide receivers but Vance McDonald. So Belichick assigned a safety, Patrick Chung -- one of his favorites -- to tail McDonald all over creation.
Tomlin's counter was to ... surrender this weapon, too. McDonald wasn't targeted at all until the final drive of the game.
I mean, if it weren't for the Moncrief mess, I'd be more speechless about this than anything.
McDonald was no less team-first when I brought it up, replying, "No one really got on a roll tonight. I thought Ben spread the ball around really well. We just need to get into a rhythm on offense."
Ben didn't spread the ball well at all. McDonald's being nice. He was 27 of 47 for 276 yards and didn't reach the end zone. That won't get it done against most counterparts, never mind Brady.
Typically, he went over the top in faulting only himself, saying, "I wasn't good enough. I wasn't giving guys balls where they needed to catch them. I wasn't good enough."
But he came closer to candor when responding to a question about trying to find the receivers who Belichick left in single coverage -- read: Moncrief --in replying, "Yeah, you're trying to the find the single guy because this defense does a great job of doubling one guy, two guys and mixing and matching it. So you try to find the singles if you can."
There it is. Right from the QB's mouth. And before that, right from Tomlin and Fichtner, because it was part of that broader game plan per how it works with this triumvirate.
Think of it this way: Tomlin and Fichtner, in the months available to prepare for an opener, could have had this conversation among themselves: 'Dammit, we don't care how many rings that guy's got or what he'll do to take away JuJu. We're going to do everything we can to make sure our best players are our best players. Just like we did in December when we ran the ball right down their throats, then threw wherever we wanted. We might go down, but we'll go down swinging.'
If that had been the mindset, they'd have kept slamming into that New England front seven in the first half (when that was still an option), they'd have kept James Conner on the field more than the long snapper -- 10 carries for 21 yards, four catches for 44 yards -- and they'd have remembered that Jaylen Samuels tormented the Patriots for 172 all-purpose yards in that December victory.
Samuels touched the ball three times in this game.
Why?
Because Belichick came out early with a heavy front. And the only reasonable response to that was ... surrender.
The white flags were everywhere, actually, when it came to short-distance calls.
In the first half, Conner was twice given the ball on third-and-1, and he was held to no gain and thrown for a 4-yard loss on those. The first was out of the shotgun for some reason, the second a toss sweep that counted on Maurkice Pouncey to pick off a linebacker he couldn't catch.
Roosevelt Nix, anyone?
Conner, the NFL leader in broken tackles per carry in 2018, anyone?
A fourth-and-1 was another Moncrief drop out of a five-wide empty set. Another third-and-1 was the flipping Plax-style fade to Moncrief.
And that's to say nothing of the meek call for Chris Boswell to boot a field goal after that fade failed. So it'd be, uh, 20-3.
Tomlin was pressed on all of this and whiffed with each.
On all those third-and-1 and fourth-and-1 stops: "You know, when you're in a type of environment like that, with the crowd noise and so forth, and you don't have the use of cadence, some of those things, it's more challenging. Obviously, we still have to convert more than we did."
Obviously. It was zero. Which is about as much credence as the crowd/cadence explanation deserved.
On Nix: "I'm not getting into the minutiae of the decisions that we make. I talked about, environmentally, why it's difficult."
Environmentally, it's difficult to preserve Antarctic ice shelves. Attempting to explain why a fullback isn't sent out to do a fullback's job ... isn't asking much of a head coach in a postgame press conference. But Tomlin would proceed to make multiple references to "environment" issues, as if he's employing people who'd never experienced a football road game. Which had me wondering who really was the one worried about this specific setting and why.
On the call to kick the field goal: "We wanted a little positivity. We didn't have enough positivity to that point. We wanted to get points, you know, to get things going."
To overcome fears?
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The season's not over, and I've got a schedule with unfinished lines to prove it:
See?
"It's the first game, and we've got 15 left," David DeCastro confirmed for me with that familiar cool of his. "This didn't go how any of us wanted. We got our butts kicked."
The execution will be better. It was Week 1. From my canvassing of the locker room, there was frustration with precision above all. As McDonald told me, "When you face the Patriots, they're going to try to beat you man-on-man. So if you weren't winning that, it's execution." He's surely right within that context.
The choice of personnel will be better, if only since personnel always sorts itself out. So yeah, if Moncrief keeps looking anything like this, he'll sit and James Washington will play way more than he did. Or Diontae Johnson. And it won't matter how much Ben seems to like Moncrief, as he reiterated after this, "I'm not worried about him. I have all the confidence in the world in him that he's going to be a guy I can count on, and I told him that. I'm not going to shy away from throwing him the ball."
Uh, OK, maybe that one will take a while.
But it'll all be better than this.
Here's the catch: That identity thing was pushed back a week. Not one player with whom I spoke -- and it was most of the ones on offense -- could concoct a solitary slice of progress in that regard. Nor should they have. And now, they've got a couple days to revisit the mistakes here, then turn attention to the Seahawks, a playoff team in 2018, and the home opener next Sunday.
This was a terrible start, but it was also a terrible way to start. I believed before this that the Steelers had superior talent to the Patriots, and I also believed that the December victory might have instilled some confidence. But it couldn't be clearer that this head coach, maybe more than anyone, is bitten hard by the 0-6 record in this place and, maybe, by the more overarching Little Brother syndrome the Steelers as a franchise have had to absorb as the NFL's second-most everything behind these Belichick/Brady Patriots.
I'm convinced that Tomlin vs. Belichick is a coach-vs.-coach duel in which Tomlin would love dearly to prevail, for personal reasons I'm positive he'd never divulge and might not even realize.
"Man, no need to sugarcoat it," was how Tomlin opened his press conference. "We weren't ready for prime time."
He'd go on to cite "prime time" repeatedly, as if the NBC national broadcast meant anything at all. As well as "this circumstance" and "in this stadium." And, this, too: "You've got to be competitive in an uncomfortable environment. We know that. We've played these guys enough."
Yikes. That's uncomfortable, all right. As if he were trying to convince himself.
Kickoff for the Seattle game, mercifully, will be a plain-old 1 p.m. Amid all the shiny, happy yellowness of Heinz Field. And most comforting of all, Pete Carroll hasn't scared anyone since stranding Marshawn Lynch in his backfield in Super Bowl XLIX.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Steelers at Patriots, Foxborough, Mass., Sept. 8, 2019 -- MATT SUNDAY / DKPS