If The Steelers Got Screwed Then It Was By Their Own...Well...You See Where This Is Going...12/18/2017
First and foremost, the play above is not - by league definition - a catch. In fact, it's not even particularly close. A failure to admit that has absolutely nothing to do with the NFL's inconsistencies regarding similar plays, but rather your own stubbornness in continuing to think that their rulebook was written in a language we call common fucking sense. If I were commissioner then the Steelers would have won on a play in which an athlete wrapped his hands around the ball, fell over the goal line untouched, and didn't maintain somewhat arbitrary control when he hit the ground a second or two later. However, seeing as the person who is has had one of his minions explain it ad nauseam, can we stop with the "no one knows what a catch is" nonsense? Any professional football fan that was up in arms by that ruling is actually a bigger asshole than the professional football fan that doesn't think the rule - as written - needs changing. If you fall while making a grab then hold onto the football like it's your first born child, because only idiots that like having the same damn conversation 4,000x over will have sympathy if you don't and it ends up getting aborted. It's that simple. Even outside the correct ruling on a crappy rule, the Pittsburgh Steelers have no one to blame for yesterday's loss but themselves and all that fault can fall on this egregious display of arrogance...
I can't believe this still needs to be said but anytime you run a play in which the intent is to outsmart Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots there is about a 98% chance you're only actually outsmarting yourself. I don't know whose call it was, but Ben Roethlisberger tried to pull the wool over the eyes of a team that has proven - time and time again - that they are ready for just about everything, and how did he do so? With a fake spike that ultimately resulted in his own team playing two-on-nine against an opportunistic secondary with the only option (other than the right option of throwing the ball away) being a player who was blanketed in red flags in the most high danger area of the field. If you take the stage out of then thinking that play was actually going to work and following through on it when it quite obviously didn't might just be dumber than throwing from the one yard line when your running back possesses the mode of the beast. I mean, pulling a real life rabbit out of his own ass may have been a more effective trick play than the highly observed "gotcha" of the quadruply covered slant pattern. Mike Tomlin and company can take the solace in the fact that they played the Patriots to within a play without the best wide receiver in football, but the actual play itself serves as a reminder that it probably won't matter who's active for the Steelers in the postseason since it's the most pressure packed moments in which their own brains aren't. The only thing more difficult than beating the Patriots physically is beating them mentally, and attempting the latter has consistently left the aggressor looking like the dunce.
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