Steelers: Three grades for brutal Week 8 loss

Offensive line: B-

While Blake’s game was a pleasant surprise, the real value came at left tackle and right guard.

Evaluating offensive line play is inherently difficult given that there’s no numbers to judge their performance by aside from the number of sacks they give up (and heaven knows some quarterbacks are responsible for their share.)

Next: Steelers: Le'Veon Bell goes down vs. Bengals

For what it’s worth, Pro Football Focus gave Alejandro Villanueva a +3.4 and David DeCastro +3.0 ratings but the eye-ball test may be the best thing that we have to judge line play.

Based on what I saw both played well and the unit as a whole did a decent job of limiting Cincinnati’s pass rush. Roethlisberger was sacked three times, but he was holding onto the ball too long too often. He needs to play sharper going forward or forget everything I said about not writing this team off yet.