Welcome to DK Sports Radio and a new Daily Shot of Steelers, my every-weekday, half-hour program on the local football franchise. Today's episode: Now that Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Old Guys have won the Super Bowl, maybe there's something to be culled from that. Or not.
Also, hey, just below, you'll find a full transcript of the opening segment:
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THE TRANSCRIPT
So everyone just followed Tom Brady to Tampa. And they won a championship. I mean, that's really it, and there's not much else to it, is there?
If so, is there anything anything the Steelers could conceivably have learned from what the Buccaneers achieved last night?
Of course, the football season ended officially last night down at Raymond James Stadium with the Buccaneers coming out on top, 31-9, and it wasn't interesting. The game wasn't interesting. Once it was clear that the Buccaneers' defensive front could rush just four guys and take advantage of Kansas City being without both of its starting tackles, then they were going to make Patrick Mahomes' life pretty hard on him. And they did. They hit him. They hurt him. If you saw the way he was limping around on both ankles, and even when he was literally falling forward on his face -- and still somehow managed to throw a 30-yard bullet -- even he wasn't going to be able to overcome that. And then Brady did his thing. Three touchdown passes. The first two to Rob Gronkowski.
I mean, it's one of those situations where you look at it and you say that there's nothing anyone can learn from this. Look what they did. They got a living legend -- who now has to be considered not just the greatest quarterback of all time, but the greatest football player of all time -- and then some other guys came. They already had the defense that was something of a secret through the NFL and shouldn't have been just because Jameis Winston was throwing 30 touchdowns on the other side of the ball. But even there, they shored that up. That's not a formula that anyone anywhere can emulate.
At the same time, maybe maybe there's a little bit of wisdom, at least, to be called. From the Pittsburgh point of view.
You could argue that the Steelers should have picked up Leonard Fournette when he was available to everyone. Leonard fournette proved a lot of people wrong. Not so much during the season. But as the season went along. And it's to Bruce Arians' credit that he was able to manage Fournette's carries so that he could stay strong when it mattered the most. But nobody anywhere foresaw Fournette running the way he did, not just last night but through the whole playoffs. I'm not sure that's something he was pulling off even when he started building his name in Jacksonville. There were some special runs over these last couple of games.
If there's a lesson, I guess it's don't be so afraid to go to the outside. Not all running backs have to come from in-house. There was a better option out there than Jaylen Samuels. Or Benny Snell. Or, for that matter, James Conner. Fournette's a better football player than Conner. Maybe if the Steelers didn't think so inwardly and so in-house, they would have taken a flyer on the guy. It's all I'm saying.
Another possibly pertains to the defense, especially when it comes to facing Mahomes. And let's not pretend that we didn't just spend most of the past few months fretting over how the Steelers could ever beat Kansas City. Even when the Steelers were 11-0, everything was all about the Chiefs.
Well, guess what? Whatever the Buccaneers did is going to fade away real, real fast. Not so for the Chiefs. They're not going anywhere. That guy at quarterback isn't going anywhere. Clyde Edwards-Helaire isn't going anywhere. Travis Kelce isn't showing any signs of slowing down. Tyreek Hill isn't showing any signs of slowing down. They're gonna have that offense, and heck, maybe between now and then they'll actually be able to significantly to it. I think they could use another solid wide receiving threat. And imagine the Chiefs with that.
You're not going to be able to face their backup tackles every time you play them. But you do know that, if you get back there, and you contain Mahomes and you knock him down and you make him think about being knocked down ... that the game can change. But you've got to do it with that four-man front. Now the Steelers obviously are capable of such a thing. We've seen them. They obviously have a different alignment than Kansas City does defensively, but we've seen them attack teams without blitzing, thereby allowing them as many players to drop back into coverage as is needed to keep the quarterback from having any time or any space to see what his options might be. While he's running for his life. I think this game's a good thing for the Steelers to have on film.
I don't know who all the Steelers are gonna have back from that defense. But I know that if they're able to have Mike Hilton and Cam Sutton, they can put multiple DBs out there, you're gonna have Devin Bush back, who knows what'll happen with Vince Williams if they'll try something else there ... but you're gonna have the personnel to be able to pull that off, provided you continue getting the push that you'd want up front.
So that's another thing, but that put that one onto the pile, as well.
You want a third one?
I've got a third one. But it's all about one individual. If I'm going to have a 39-year old quarterback who's consuming a massive portion of my salary cap, and I'm listening to him when he says, 'Oh, I want this receiver back' and 'I want this' and 'I want that' and 'I'm gonna try to talk my center into coming back' and everything, acting as if it's 10 years ago, acting as if he didn't just spend an entire season not throwing the ball downfield or throwing three picks in the first quarter against the Cleveland Browns in a playoff game ... If I'm going to have that quarterback, I'd like to see a little bit more of what we saw from the 43-year old quarterback last night.
I'd like to see Ben Roethlisberger fall on that football in the Browns game or try to fall on the football the way Tom Brady did. I'd like to see Ben Roethlisberger line up behind center not for shotguns but right there behind center to show teams a different look. I'd like to see Ben Roethlisberger be a little bit open to play action which every team in the NFL is using effectively, except for one. I'd like to see Ben Roethlisberger. Be open minded to different ideas the way Brady was this year with Bruce Arians basically ordering him to throw downfield, something he hadn't done in any significant measure in New England. For years. All he was doing was Dink and dunk here and there. Finding his random Amendolas and hitting those guys and then letting them do the square rooting around for the extra yardage. Arians told him that's not how it's going to be in the NFL, that we're gonna throw downfield. He threw downfield, not a ton. But he got a big DPI on that ball to Mike Evans. I know it was a lousy call missing my point here. He made the throw. He threw other deep balls. The Steelers have a quarterback who didn't want to do that until like week 13 or 14 and even then needed almost to be shamed into it. When his backup came in, Mason Rudolph in Cleveland, and was just flinging it downfield, almost showing him up.
There are things that Ben can change. I didn't even mention conditioning. Brady is famously a fitness freak nutrition freak and he doesn't do it a month or two before training camp. He does it all year round. If you watch Brady in this game, you don't think to yourself, man, that dude's old. He's really working with some limitations out there. No, he wasn't bouncing around like Mahomes wasn't forced to either. And no, he wasn't scrambling for big yards. He wasn't exactly Lamar Jackson either. But you didn't look at him and think, Wow, he's really, really ancient. I'm fearing for his life out there. And there were a lot of points this past season for the Steelers, we wouldn't have been remiss in thinking that about Ben.
So yeah, lessons to be learned. Definitely.