Following the embarrassing loss to the Ravens in the playoffs and coming off a five-game collapse to end this once-promising season, numerous talking heads are fairly critiquing the Steelers. Despite this disaster, Cameron Heyward was quick to come out and defend Mike Tomlin and the coaching staff.
Following the loss, Heyward came out and said that it wasn’t a coaching message issue and that players still believe in Tomlin. To him, it was just an execution issue by the players, shifting the blame away from the coaches. While the players are certainly deserving of blame, this entire debacle has coaching issues all over it, and Heyward doesn’t need to defend this staff right now.
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While I have no doubt that Tomlin still has the locker room given one of his biggest strengths is his ability to relate to players. To sum everything up as an execution issue is cheap though, and fans should be able to see through that.
The failures in this game weren’t a one-off event. Since the Eagles game, this team has looked like a shell of itself. The offense was incapable of moving the ball and the defense lacked any sort of significant impact. Minus the third quarter of this loss, where this team looked like it did earlier in the season, the same issues were constantly on display.
This team trots out the same-looking coverages and schemes week in and week out, and instead of trying new things, they choose to keep running into the brick wall. They fell from firmly in control of the AFC North to limping into the sixth seed of the playoffs with a quick exit once again. That has to fall on the coaches.
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If that truly was just an execution issue, then it is still up to the coaches to make the necessary changes to fix that. It didn’t matter what the circumstances were each week, this team never showed up to play. You had analysts and even announcers question where the passion was from this team. That screams coaching to me far more than just player execution.
Now, Heyward is smart enough to know that he can’t just come out and blame coaches for the loss as a captain of this team, but shifting all of the blame on the players is equally wrong. There are a lot of issues on this team, and those issues have been consistent year over year. It is time to properly question just what the coaches are doing.