Kovacevic: Why Ben was right to flip out

CLEVELAND -- As Ben Roethlisberger strode toward the sideline late in the first half Sunday, he undoubtedly spoke for the sum total of Steelers Nation upon barking a series of expletives toward Mike Tomlin.

Then Todd Haley.

Then pretty much anyone within earshot, because that's precisely the scope of the fire that burns within this particular franchise quarterback.

And then, once his helmet had been peeled off and he watched yet another Jordan Berry punt, enough heat had been released that a cooler head began to prevail. Landry Jones, his trusted confidante as much as his backup, made the first approach, soon followed by Haley and Antonio Brown. Those four formed an impromptu huddle on one of the long benches, and they began to discuss all that was going so miserably wrong for the offense.



"We just weren't there," AB would tell me later. "First game. First time out there together for a lot of us in a long time. We just didn't have it."

No, they most certainly did not.

Yes, they did win. They played the Browns, you might have heard. But the cold fact that it was a 21-18 tiptoe rather than the expected candy theft, that'll only be magnified by the colder fact that this tour-de-force offense, one that's expected to sail from here to Super Bowl LII and a seventh championship ... well, you saw it.

There was nothing going on the ground, with Le'Veon Bell held to 32 yards on 10 carries, only 8 on four carries in the first half. There was nothing going for James Conner, either, with 11 yards on four carries.

Rushing total for the day: 35 yards.

Passing total for the day: 263 yards.

The latter sounds a whole lot better. But at the time of Ben's outbursts, on the Steelers' third-to-last drive of the second quarter, their passing yards were ... wait for it ... 27. Oh, for real. The first four drives were punt, punt, punt, punt, with only three first downs accrued along the way.

And would you believe that, of the offense's 14 plays to that point, 11 of them were sideways short routes?

Nope, me neither. Still don't.

It's often difficult to discern who's calling the plays for the Steelers. The next time Tomlin answers a question on that subject will be the first. Haley only speaks to reporters once a week, and that comes on Thursdays. And Ben -- hm ... I'll word this delicately out of respect to all that he's achieved -- tends to lay claim to calling the plays only after events have met with his satisfaction.

Well, these events very clearly were not trending that way, judging by his vocal ire, so let's assume that this horizontal road map was authored by Haley, that noted scholar from the University of Bubble Screen.

That fair?

Good, because there's honestly no other way to explain the rationale behind a pass like the straight-to-his-right flick to Martavis Bryant that opened the second drive, other than that maybe the Steelers wanted to lure the Browns into a false sense of security by showing their utterly senseless side:



It was nearly picked. Imagine if it had been.

Heck, imagine if these weren't the bleeping Browns.

So when those four met at the bench to try to right all this, one can only assume that the conversation consisted of a total of two words: THROW. DOWNFIELD.

Should anyone have felt compelled to elaborate, a logical addendum would have been: IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, ALLOW YOUR GENERATIONAL QUARTERBACK TO THROW THE BALL FARTHER THAN A FEW FEET FROM HIS NOSE.

Or something like that.

Whatever was actually spoken, some common sense was shaken from the cobwebs. Ben found AB for 10 yards, then Jesse James for 6. Another punt resulted, but it beat slamming foreheads into the cement scheme that Cleveland defensive coordinator Gregg Williams had concocted to stop the run, one that David DeCastro almost jokingly referred to as a "20-man front."

Haley's obvious thought was that he could bypass the Browns' heavy box by flicking left and right. And it's obvious because he's reacted that way every time John Harbaugh and the Ravens have tried it on him, too.

But here's the wrench: It doesn't work.

The Steelers have some supremely talented wide receivers, but they don't have a young Hines Ward in the fold to break tackles or escape tight quarters. Going sideways to Bryant is going to result in one of his ankles being grabbed and his body embedded into the grass.

Besides, it doesn't exactly take a mind-melding of Bill Walsh and Don Coryell to grasp that, when you have one of the NFL's premier deep threats, you ... oh, I can't even complete the sentence.

The next great leap of logic occurred on the Steelers' next drive, a 95-yard gem that consisted of -- read them out loud with me, and I mean this -- pass to AB for 15 yards, pass out of the backfield to Bell for 6 yards, pass to a streaking AB down the middle for 50 yards after it caromed off a linebacker's hand ...



... then two more passes to AB totaling 30 yards, followed by this bullet to James in the end zone:



Other stuff mattered on the day. AB was at his most excellent, catching all 11 targets for 182 yards. James reminded us all that he's not about to hand his job to Vance McDonald. T.J. Watt and Anthony Chickillo had two sacks each, with Watt adding an acrobatic interception and Chickillo a touchdown-scoring blocked punt recovery. And yeah, they did come out on top against an opponent that, despite its wretched history, seemed to genuinely impress the Steelers.

"They played us hard, from front to finish," Mike Mitchell said. "I mean to the very last play."

Wonderful.

But this late drive, at least from this press box perch, was what counted most. Assuming the lesson resonates.

THROW. DOWNFIELD.

There are times when this coaching staff, for reasons probably not even they could explain, forget that, in this offense, the run doesn't set up the pass. It's the other way around. Because Ben sets up everything. I mean, it's admirable that Bell and Conner went full-bore into those 20-man fronts, but it's also mindless old-school machismo. It's running to show that the bad guys can't stop the run.

On the drive that set Ben ablaze, the Steelers began under their goalposts, handed off to Conner for 1 yard, handed off to Conner again for a 1-yard loss and, after two more of the short sideways passes, handed off to Bell for no gain.

Gee, can't imagine what got into the quarterback.

How big was that drive that ended the first half?

"Huge," Roethlisberger said. "We went to a four-receiver, one-tight-end set. We were throwing the ball, trying to create a mismatch on the backside with AB. That's big, coming into halftime and putting points on the board."

"It was good just to feel like we were getting loose," Ramon Foster replied when I asked him the same question. "We needed to stretch the field, you know?"

I asked AB, too: