DK’s Daily Shot of Steelers: Emboldened in Baltimore!

DK’s Daily Shot of Steelers: Emboldened in Baltimore!

It was one game, one success, and it sure was no beauty here in Baltimore. But, uh, you know, uh, they won the game. And by the way, they won the game for the most part because the player at the most important position was the best out of anyone on that field. Good morning to you. Good Monday morning from Baltimore. I’m Dan Kvachovic of DK Pittsburgh Sports and this is Daily Shot of Steelers. It comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you’re into hockey and/or baseball, I also offer daily shots of Penguins and Pirates in the same place that you found this Steelers 27, Ravens 22. And while I can confidently report from Mnt Bank Stadium that everyone associated with this team was painfully aware of the things that didn’t go well over those three hours in their eyes. The only thing that they really had insisted on seeing go well did so. That of course was up on the scoreboard. The run defense got gashed yet again. 217 yards on the ground for the Ravens. The Steelers own running game, which they themselves had stressed would be of utmost importance, 34 total yards. On top of all that, there was either attrition in the form of four different players getting concussed, notably Darnell Washington, but others getting hurt, banged up along the way. Patrick Queen came up with an ugly rib injury that was exacerbated by a play later in that same game and had him off the field with the green dot. Had that transferred to Payton Wilson, the coaches were freaking out on the sideline. Nothing, by the way, freaks them out more than losing their green dot guy. They had other obstacles really that were laid in their path. Although the main one putting not one but two brand new to the team wide receivers out onto the field right into the offense in Marquez Valdez Scantling and Adam Thielen that coming at the cost of Roman Wilson becoming a healthy scratch. I haven’t even mentioned running out of left tackles. Andress Pete went down at left tackle. Calvin Anderson had already been out at left tackle. And along came Dylan Cook, who was so instrumental to the Steelers of late that his name didn’t even get mentioned among the fringest practice squattiest guys on the roster for the flip card that was passed out to the media on game day. and someone something very obviously was going to have to rise way way up to compensate. That was Aaron Rogers. You want the basics? Okay. 23 of 34 for 284 yards, a touchdown, no picks. Not exactly the kind of line you’ve gotten used to seeing from the quarterback position in the post Ben Rothllessberger era. Really, really, really good stuff. Really, really, really, really not at all describing the kind of day he actually had answering this game. And this really is the headline as far as his performance goes. He had just seven deep completions the entire season. Those are defined pretty commonly now through football as 20 plus yards thrown in the air. Seven of them all year. In this one, he completed all three of his deep passes. All of them, not surprisingly, to DK Medaf and all of them amassing 121 yards. He also had one I feel compelled to add to Calvin Austin that went just a hair under 20 in the air, but also and obviously I thought it was actually one of the more important plays of the game as the offense really needed to get out of its zone and keep the ball while the defense had started to understandably wear down because the offense wasn’t anywhere near as effective in the second half. All of it good stuff. Good good stuff. Still doesn’t tell the story. Like not close. Rogers had one pass that was batted at the line of scrimmage. Came back to him. All he wanted to do, as he would explain, was to bat the thing down. He tried, but he couldn’t because there were ravens in his face attempting to do the thing that he would then have to do, which was to catch the ball himself. But since it looked like it might be loose on his way down to the ground with that ball, all the usual stuff that ensues in such a setting ensued. And it included at least one of the Ravens going after that fractured left wrist that he was now sporting a soft cast on to protect, but he still held on. And guess what? That’s not a fumble recovery. That’s not an interception. Obviously, same team. He was credited with the catch. He also did his oozing of intangibles. I don’t know that they have oozed quite the way that they oozed here yesterday. He was not in just the faces of someone who would screw up or occasionally run the wrong route or picking on somebody. He was equal opportunity, obnoxious really I guess you could say, as he needed to be. This was a team that lacked discipline, that was not doing everything that it could at practices. He spoke of that openly after that Buffalo debacle. He challenged his wide receivers specifically also publicly to watch more film with him, to pay closer attention, to know and understand where they’re supposed to be. And heck, he was so grateful about how that went in this setting that he found his own way to compliment both Valdez Scantling and Theelan just for running the right routes and making sure that by doing that they would take attention away from Metaf to enough of a degree that the Ravens never felt comfortable doubling Metaf. F. And yes, I know that’s a mistake regardless, but it might not have been a mistake if the Ravens really felt like there was just no one else worth covering. Or worse, they were just running in random squiggly lines. Well, I mean, I I hate to sound like a broken record, but it’s all about practice. you know, when you when you go out there and execute and practice like we did this week gives you the confidence to be able to make some of those plays. And I thought it was uh our most crisp week of preparation on the field. I think off the field we’ve been really good, but I thought the energy was good. Um, not a big believer in coincidences. So, I got to think that uh just Marquez and and Adam out there, you know, made a difference from a professionalism standpoint. Not saying those other guys don’t have professionalism. I love Gen Roman and all of our other guys, but I just think there was an extra level of focus this week. Extra level of focus. You know who can just walk in out of nowhere and take command of a franchise’s offense like that? Still doesn’t tell the story. I saved my favorite for last. This man just turned 42. I could not help but ask him after he rushed for a touchdown. And after a handful of other times, he escaped what I thought was a significant enough Baltimore rush that I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sacked. And I don’t just mean in those situations. He wasn’t sacked at all. He ended up giving all the credit to the line, which is smart on his part. It also isn’t remotely accurate. So I asked him this. You still feeling as I don’t want to use the word nimble here, but I mean you moved around pretty well in this game. There have been other times this season. Is that Do you still feel like that’s something that you feed off when you can pull it off? Yeah. I mean, some games you feel better than others. I was telling the lineman, you’ll understand this when you’re 40. You know, some days you feel better than than others. Wake up and there’s no specific reason why. You know, thinking like, what did I do last night? Did I sleep wrong or whatever. But some days you feel great. Other days you feel maybe just good. Today I felt great. Um maybe because it got such a beautiful grass field. Um but I felt uh felt good moving around there and then to be able to run that touchdown. Been a long time that there was in no way to play at all. It was play to to Johnny and the whole left side just caved in. I started running realized I had two uh uh larger humans chasing me that I maybe was equal to or slightly faster than uh so that was nice to get into. Now, the key word in my question, the key terminology was nimble. Press conference gets done. He steps away from the podium and down off the stage, turns toward a door that’s right by the side of that stage, continues to walk away through that door, turns back around, looks at me again where I was still sitting, and says, “N, I’m sorry, but that’s really, really cool.” When we come back, J1Q. Luxembourg Garbet Kelly and George is a personal injury law firm in Western Pennsylvania that represents injured people in automobile accidents, workers compensation cases, and medical malpractice claims. The attorneys at Luxembourg Garbid Kelly and George pride themselves in doing what they say they’re going to do. It’s important to them that when they make you a promise, they keep that promise. And this law firm has been keeping promises for over 80 years. Luxembourg Garbet Kelly and George has been AV rated. That’s the highest rating a law firm can receive for legal ability and ethics. And the lawyers at the firm have been designated super lawyers. That’s a real thing. For over 15 years, rare combination there. Luxembourg, Garbet, Kelly, and George has offices in Cranberry, Newcastle, Beaver Falls, Butler, and Lwood City. Learn more about them at lgk.com or by calling 888842-5454. Again, that’s 8888425454. Football season’s finally here. Time to check out the latest odds, futures, and win totals on the FanDuel sports book. Think the Steelers are headed to the Super Bowl? Lock in your bets today. Whatever your game, FanDuel Sportsbook delivers the latest lines, futures, and specials so you can join in on all the action. got a couple of things to share here through the J1Q segment. You can imagine there’s just a ton of entries that arrive after an event like that. Eric Brumfield says, “DK, I can’t say that I’m happy. I do enjoy the win, but this is the story time and time again. I expected us to win this game. That’s what this team does when it’s under heavy scrutiny. They come out and they play their rear ends off. They make plays they hadn’t been making. They open up the playbook more as if to say, “Here, are you happy? Now get off our backs.” And then the next week, it’s all back to the same thing that we’d been seeing before. So, I won’t truly enjoy anything until it looks like they’ve truly changed their ways. I’m not going to lie, Eric. I’m thinking the same thing. I really am. Both before and after this game, I really felt walking into Mnt Bank Stadium that for actually a lot of reasons that the Steelers were going to win. The main one, if you want me to be totally honest, is that I’ve seen Lamar Jackson of late. That’s actually kind of how he’s looked. He is not NFL healthy. He’s just not. He of course is a massive variable. I also was aware of that Baltimore secondary. I wasn’t aware of how effectively Aaron Rogers and and really working in tandem with Arthur Smith and DK Medaf would be able to attack it. But they sure did. But the other thing is what you said, which is whether it’s the, you know, the games that we’re citing here on this show all the time. It’s Dublin against the Vikings when they finally came up with a way to compensate for that leaky offensive line. You know, just at the sixth lineman and oh by the way, keep Darnell Washington in to block two. But they tried stuff like you’re saying here are you happy now? Get off our backs. And then there was another struggle and then the Colts come into town and they’re the number one team in the NFL. And what happens there? The Steelers changed a whole bunch of stuff in a beyond belief twist. They out coached Shane Stikken, which they really did, only to regress or revert, like you said, to what they’d been. So, what are you thinking now? Well, here come the Dolphins next Monday. Dolphins are playing a lot better. They won again yesterday. Yeah, it was against the Jets, but you still have to take care of business. Return of Minka, all that stuff. And and you you have you have no idea, Eric. You you have no idea what to expect. I don’t either. I don’t know how anybody could. I appreciated this one from Krill who says, “DK, say what you want about the defense. This defense literally played their butts off through attrition and held the Ravens to 19 points. A win is a win on the road. Hostile environment. I don’t care how ugly. The Steelers are in first place in the AFC North. They showed massive heart in this game. made more plays than Baltimore did and it meant something to me. Massive. I’m glad that you brought that up because it offers me a little bit of an opening to add something that I’ve yet to mention in this show, and that’s that there are some players who maybe aren’t as popular as others who are doing crazy things to be on the field right now. I know the name that’s going to come to mind for you is the well the one that I have foremost in my own. That’s Patrick Queen. Guys, trust me, you do not know what he’s going through to be on that field. You do not know that he was tugging on the sleeves of his coaches on the sideline urging them to let him back in when he had to miss a handful of plays. Listen to me on this. If you hear nothing else that I have spoken on this episode to this point, I have criticized robustly at times disturbingly every time when efforts come into question and it has come into question. Not cheap shots, not being bitter, not being angry, just look at film, look at sequences. That wasn’t the case here at all. when you saw the Ravens trampling the Steelers, a lot of it was just gushing through the middle. I’ll have another episode, I’m sure, later in this week, trying to figure out what’s wrong with Keanu Benton in particular. But this wasn’t about effort in anything other than a big-time positive context. They left it all out there. The last one I’m going to bring up here comes from James Hastings, who says that neither team was special, but we kind of outlasted them. Yeah, I here’s the thing. A whole bunch of these were about the catch/noncatch at the end that had the Ravens complaining but not too bitterly. That had the fans upset but not excessively upset. And as ever, because I’m in the press box, there’s there’s no television. There are silent monitors well up over our heads that to be honest with you are kind of hard to see. So, I I’m not sure what was being shown other than a couple of quick glimpses that I took, and I have no idea what anybody would have been saying on the broadcast, and that’s always the case. But I sure do feel like I’ve noticed a divide between how a lot of people reacted in writing in this direction and in other forums, and even how the Ravens themselves handled it. Not to go on a complete tangent here, but that was not a catch. You might want the rule to be different so that a catch can be judged a different way, but that call that was made was made by the rule the way the rule is written. John Harbaugh knew that, kept his comments to a minimum because of that. Isaiah likely, he who did not complete that catch, wanted nothing to do with an endless string of questions being put his way by the Baltimore reporters. For anyone unaware, from our coverage on DK Pittsburgh Sports, there was a pool reporter selected by the combined Pittsburgh and Baltimore media groups to go and interview the NFL’s vice president of instant replay, Mark Butterworth, as well as the onfield referee, Alex Moore. Butterworth nailed this and with no hesitation either, which is why it didn’t take very long to make this call. I quote, “The ruling on the field was a touchdown. We quickly looked at the play. The receiver controlled the ball in the air, had his right foot down, then his left foot down. The control is the first aspect of the catch. The second aspect, his two feet or a body part in bounds, which he did have. Then the third step is an act common to the game. and before he could get the third foot down, the ball was ripped out. Therefore, it was an incomplete pass.” End quote. Mark Butterworth, vice president of instant replay for the NFL, just told everyone what they should have been able to see for themselves. Joey Porter knocked the ball out. Porter made a terrific play. Really heads up stuff. And something, by the way, culturally that can be traced back to St. Vincent College. I’ve shared with you many, many stories from Latroe about how the defense would even after it would appear to everyone else that the play was up, somebody from that side of the ball would come along and just bang it out of your hands. And it would look, to be honest with you, a little bit rude, but it was their way. This, of course, begins with Mike Tolan, of emphasizing to both sides the importance of completing everything that you do. Likely didn’t. He just didn’t. He held that football out in front of him like he was trying to rescue an infant from a fire. Just pull it in. Pull it up against the numbers. Porter’s not going to have anything to swat at. He didn’t do that. He didn’t catch the ball. I’ll emphasize this again. You cannot like the rule, but nobody’s in any position to question the ruleing. The ruleing is based on the current rule. And it was completely completely correct. So, no, the Steelers didn’t have the refs as their best player or any other narratives that anyone would want to cling to just because they were really mad last week. Last week was last week. They were horrible. They deserved everything they got at Acer Stadium and maybe even worse. This week, they flipped that script in a pretty big way. So, you can be Ellie Gonzalez who wrote to me, “I still want Mike Tomlin gone. This means nothing.” What did the defense give up? Over 400 yards. Yeah, come on. If not for the old goat, we’re staring at another loss. Okay, nothing wrong with that. I’m way more in tune with Eric. Why is it the story one week that everything is so desperate and we’re going to try all these different things and the next week that same mindset doesn’t seem to apply. At some point or other, it’s got to get bottled and it’s got to get reopened and it’s got to get poured on somebody else’s head. Beat the Dolphins. Take eight and six up to Detroit. Do your best against the Lions and then get to Cleveland and take care of the Browns. That’s that’s your division. That’s your division title. That’s your fourth seed in the AFC. That’s a home playoff game. But stop reverting all the time. It’s just weird. You’re not proving anything to anybody at any level, coach or player. Apologize for running a little bit long today. It’s just this one had so much. And I got to remember we have all week to do this, too. And for that matter, we also have today 400 p.m. Eastern the double shot of Steelers. I hope you can join us for that. Thanks so much for being here and for supporting what it is that we do.

Go deep? Again and again? Bold stuff here in Baltimore!

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