Well, the first game of the 2023 season did not go well for the Steelers. You can use whatever word you want to describe what we witnessed against the San Francisco 49ers, awful, terrible, feckless, disgraceful, etc. I chose to use the word disgraceful. Fortunately, it is only one game but we need to figure things out pretty quickly.
The reason I say we need to figure things out pretty quickly is this: An NFL season lasts a finite amount of time. Every game that is lost is a game that cannot be played again. I guess the only saving grace, if there is one, is that the loss is a non-conference loss.
Let's see what we learned on the offensive side of the ball.
The Steelers offense was listless and feckless against the 49ers defense
I realize I've already mentioned the word 'feckless', but I think that's an appropriate word given how the game unfolded. According to ESPN, the offense managed a woeful two-hundred and thirty-nine total yards, the bulk of which came via the passing game.
We had to abandon the running game fairly early on. At one point, we were down by twenty points. That usually dictates what you have to do on offense to try to get back into the game. Try as we might, we managed to engineer one scoring drive.
To put this into perspective, the Steelers offense ran sixty-one plays, averaged a 'tad' under four yards per play, and possessed the ball for only a 'shade' over twenty-two minutes. Considering an NFL game is sixty minutes long, that's not good and that typically does not lead to a victory. In this case, it did not. Not a whole lot else to say about the offense.
Let's see what we learned on the defensive side of the ball.