Reviewing the Pittsburgh Steelers after a Quarter of the Season

PITTSBURGH - OCTOBER 4: Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger #7 of the Pittsburgh Steelers throws the ball in the first quarter against the San Diego Chargers at Heinz Field on October 4, 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)

So far this year, there has been a lot of discussion among Pittsburgh Steelers fans about why the team has not been able to put teams away when they’ve had the chance. In only one game so far have they outperformed their opponents in the 4th quarter, and that was in week 1 against the Tennessee Titans. The Titans outplayed them for most of the first three quarters, but as they did in so many games in 2008, the Steelers fought back and clawed out a tough win. Since then, though, Pittsburgh has been outplayed in the 4th quarter of every other game, with the worst performance coming in Week 3 against the Cincinnati Bengals. I commented on these issues in my Around the NFL post, but I wanted to take a more detailed look at what the team’s statistical performance looked like. In this post, I will review the Steelers’ per game statistics to this point in the season compared to their numbers from last season. Since there seems to be much debate as to who is at fault for the two losses, I thought it would be worthwhile to compare the performance of each unit. All statistics come from Pro-Football-Reference.com.

Around the NFL in Week 4

This week, I’ve decided to take a little break from the game reviews that I had been doing and just post a review of the NFL weekend as a whole with my thoughts on several things that happened in various games. I’ll probably do a couple of posts on how a few different teams are looking to this point in the season as well this week. There were a few things that caught my attention this weekend that I felt like talking about so, I figured I would put down here on the blog. For example, there were the outstanding defensive back plays of Champ Bailey and Darren Sharper, the continuing wussification of the quarterback position by the NFL, a touchdown that was dropped in the endzone that was overturned and ruled a TD, and a few others.