It would have been easy for the Steelers to have been knocked off-kilter coming into Week 5. They’d suffered their second blowout loss of the season, this one by a 30–6 count in Houston. The public was firing offensive coordinator Matt Canada, benching Kenny Pickett and questioning the direction of the team.
Meanwhile, Mike Tomlin was showing classic Steelers-Ravens highlights.
The 17th-year Steelers coach isn’t new to Baltimore week, of course, now as steeped in the rivalry as anyone ever has been after a generation on his side of it. As such, he knew his team—as unacceptable as he publicly said the Texans game was—needed no browbeating to get itself ready for the rivalry game. Their time, he figured, would be better spent understanding what was coming, rather than looking back at what was.
“Coach Tomlin is very even-keeled in the victories and the losses,” linebacker and captain T.J. Watt said over his cell after getting home Sunday night. “He just had a good message all week of letting all the new guys in the locker room understand the meaning of this rivalry and how big of a game this truly was. … It was showing old clips of how deep the history is, all the big plays, how these games always seem like they’re 13–10, 16–13, tight games.”
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So if you’re going to call Tomlin a master psychologist for how he handled the front end of the week, you could call him a prophet for knowing how the back end would play out, too.
Final score: Steelers 17, Ravens 10.
And it was a game, like so many of these have been over the last quarter century, that found its beauty in its ugliness. It was 7–0 after a quarter, 10–3 at the half, and still 10–3 going into the final quarter. Tomlin’s message to his Steelers that they’d have to grind out a game like this was coming to life right in front of the players.
Pittsburgh had just 88 yards of offense and six first downs in the first half. The Steelers were outgained nearly 3–1 over that time, and a takeaway from the defense, really, was the only thing that kept the Steelers from being shut out through three quarters—a Larry Ogunjobi forced fumble helped set up a 43-yard Chris Boswell field goal near the end of the first half.
Yet a defense carrying a heavy burden kept its head about it, and the offense kept its head up through its struggles, trusting the breakthrough would eventually come.
“At the end of the day, we’re just trying to do our job,” Watt says. “We understand that if we do our job of stopping them on fourth-and-shorts like we were able to do today, or force them into field goals, or even turn the ball over and give the ball to our offense in good field position, then we’re just doing our job. We can’t control anything else. We talk all the time about controlling the controllables. As cliché as it sounds, that’s truly how it is.”
Eventually, that approach would break the dam, and it started with Miles Killebrew’s blocking a punt and generating a safety that cut the deficit to 10–5. “Things like that, guys just ante up,” Watt says. “I see Miles Killebrew working day in and day out trying to block a punt. He’s done it multiple times for us here.”
After that, a handful of players, all younger than Watt, stepped forward to do what Tomlin told them they’d have a chance to do—and put their stamp on a fierce rivalry.
• Down 10–8, Steelers returner Gunner Olszewski fumbled a punt return, and that put the Ravens in first-and-goal at the Pittsburgh 7. Which brought Watt back to training camp, where the Steelers run a goal-line drill, first offense vs. first defense, where the offense gets seven chances to score from the 2.
“We do that every single day in training camp,” Watt says. “You get the offense vs. defense, seven shots, live, ball on the 2-yard line. Those are things that we prepare for every single day of training camp and once a week in season. At that point, it’s just like this is seven-shot football. We know what calls we like down here. We’ve run them hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Just execute your job and we’re going to be all right.”
It’s also where a rivalry legacy would step forward. On third-and-goal from the 5, Joey Porter Jr., the rookie corner and son of a Steelers legend, got position on Odell Beckham Jr. on a fade and picked off Lamar Jackson —belying predraft questions that existed on his ball skills for the position.
“That’s another one of those things,” Watt says. “He didn’t have that many interceptions in college, but he’s had a ton of picks in practice, even dating back to camp. A guy who’s always working with one of our team ball boys, Lou, he’s working with him before and after practice every single day, working on his hands, catching balls. Stuff like that pays off. Hard work gets rewarded.”
• From there, the Steelers set up shop at the Ravens’ 20, with 4:06 left. At that point Pickett was 14-of-26 with 146 yards and hadn’t inspired much confidence on the outside that he was capable of turning it around in game. But the Steelers’ players had other thoughts.
“Kenny is obviously a leader on the offense as a captain for us,” Watt says. “I feel like he’s done a good job of staying even-keel and continuing to work. As guys continue to see you work, whether you have success or not, they’re going to have respect for you. I have respect for Kenny, how he works every day throughout the building. He’s in there early. He’s out of the building late. There’s not much more you can ask from a guy like that. He’s going to continue to get better.”
And he’d get better when the Steelers needed it most Sunday, connecting on four of his final five throws for 78 yards, with none bigger than his final two.
The first was on a third-and-4 just before the two-minute warning, with Pickett hitting George Pickens on a deep back-shoulder comeback off the far hash for 21 yards. The next was a 41-yard touchdown dime down the right sideline for Pickens again, after the second-year receiver found a second gear to get past Ravens All-Pro Marlon Humphrey, completing a sequence that, at once, showed a young quarterback’s poise and, maybe even more that, on the other end, a young receiver’s potential.
“It’s not surprising,” Watt says of Pickens. “The guy just has a very calm confidence about himself. At this point, he knows how good he is. He really does. It’s just a matter of getting him the ball and letting him go to work. He’s very reliable when the ball’s in the air. It’s not 50-50 balls. They’re 70-30 balls, 60-40, whatever you want to call them. If you give him space, the yards after catch are incredible, too. I’m not surprised.”
• After that, it was on the defense to close it out, and, truth be told, Watt almost seemed a little embarrassed by the credit he’d gotten for the dagger his unit delivered with just over a minute left and the Ravens in first-and-10 at their own 44. Yes, he did recover the fumble. But in the aftermath, he wanted to give Alex Highsmith, his bookend at a position that’s as storied in Pittsburgh as shortstop is at Yankee Stadium, full credit for creating it.
“I always get pretty uncomfortable—everybody’s always cheering for the guy that picks up the fumble, and at the end of the day, I’m just in the right spot at the right time,” Watt says. “That’s a hell of a play by Alex Highsmith, a guy that continually, when the moment is as thick as it possibly can get and we need a play, he’s always there on the backside stripping the quarterback. … Alex made a huge play. I was just the guy that was fortunate enough to be in the right spot at the right time and scoop the fumble up. That was all Alex Highsmith.”
Soon thereafter, Watt would get a big play of his own, sacking Jackson with 15 seconds left, using what he’d seen on how the Ravens were chipping him to beat the offense to the spot, and ending the game. He went WWE afterward to celebrate, ripping off his helmet and drawing a flag for his troubles.
“Yeah, I didn’t care. Too much emotion,” he says, with a laugh. “I just got a little worried that it was going to be like, Baltimore gets the ball back. That was the only thing I was holding my breath for.”
Of course, that’s not how the rules work, and it’s a good bet that’d be one penalty Tomlin was probably going to let slide.
Now, Watt knows what the easy thing to say here would be—that all these young guys making huge plays in perhaps the NFL’s angriest, fiercest rivalry would anoint them as true Steelers and send the 2023 team on its way.
And maybe it’ll play out that way.
But when I brought the idea up to him, that this could be a launching point for all that ascending young talent, Watt tapped the brakes and went, well, Tomlin mode on me.
“You’d like to think so,” he says. “I’m not a guy that’s going to get ahead of myself. I’m trying to take it one week at a time, get healthy after this bye week, just continuing to try and build off the momentum. It’s so hard to stack wins in this league. We talk about it every time after a win, it’s all about stacking wins. That comes with having confidence week in and week out. After a game like this, it certainly sparks confidence in the group.
“I’m just hoping that we can continue to perform like we did today.”
And no, it wasn’t perfect.
But for the Steelers who listened to Tomlin all week, it was, in a certain way, exactly how their coach had drawn it up.
