After a second embarrassment in prime time over three weeks, Steelers captain Cam Heyward once again questioned the team’s togetherness. He seemed, and not unfairly, to attribute lapses to players not all playing on the same page, doing their job. While that’s typically the cause of such issues, the repeated nature of the comments raises a red flag for Doug Whaley.
“That is highly alarming, especially when you think about what came out of his mouth after the Green Bay game when he was talking about buy-in”, the former NFL general manager said of Heyward’s comments on the Black & Gold Experience program on WPXI. “When you’re talking about trust and buy-in, that to me is alarming because that is the foundation of what is being preached over at 3400 South Water Street”.
Whaley may well be sensationalizing Heyward’s comments beyond their intention, but the Steelers are clearly struggling. He constantly preaches everybody doing their own job and not trying to make plays outside of that. “We talk about it, but do we really know what we’re doing?”, he asked. It comes down to trust, and when things aren’t going well, in the moment of a play, it’s hard to trust instinctively.
“Whatever is being preached and extolled from the top down is not getting to that locker room”, Whaley fears, based on Cam Heyward’s comments about how the Steelers have performed in two of the past three games. “This is another game, of and it’s another way to say, ‘We’re not all together. We’re not all really buying into what’s being told from either what our teammates are doing or what our coaches are saying’”.
The more concerning comment that Heyward made after the loss to the Packers to me, quite frankly, was an admission of how the Steelers just let the game snowball out of control. While that happened to some extent last night, they were at least still competing. Some egregious mistakes, like Calvin Austin III’s drop that led to an interception and Ke’Shawn Williams’ muffed punt, catastrophized the final quarter.
The Steelers ordinarily play much cleaner than this, which is likely a core part of Heyward’s frustration. There is really no reason for this to be happening. It’s worth noting that, after their success last week, many players seemed to want to keep a simpler game plan. I don’t know how much of that carried over to this week’s game plan, but whatever they did didn’t work.
But the thing is, unlike the Packers game, the Steelers have the offense to blame for this one much more than the defense. Aaron Rodgers had his worst game of the season and their playmakers didn’t make plays. The only consistent producer was Jaylen Warren, who really sacrificed his body on the day.
But does Cam Heyward’s comments really tell us anything about the Steelers that we didn’t know? When players play out of their assignment, leading to gaps and big plays, it’s generally due to a lack of trust. And you generally have a lack of trust when you’re struggling. And we already knew that the Steelers were struggling, so the lack of trust can hardly be surprising. Does it make a difference of the Steelers’ captain says it publicly?
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