The Pittsburgh Steelers earned a 19-10 victory over the Carolina Panthers Thursday night in their preseason finale.
While head coach Mike Tomlin was pleased to get a win, he was disappointed by his team’s execution throughout much of the game.
“It’s good to get a win. It’s some good. It’s a lot of things that you don’t like, to be quite honest with you. I thought we were highly penalized. ... The tackling was shaky at best at times. And so we got some things to work on, but it’s good to do that with a victory.”
The Steelers committed 13 penalties for 104 yards in the win, with several of those penalties being called while starters were still in the game.
Steelers starting right tackle Troy Fautanu made it clear following the preseason finale that he was disappointed with Pittsburgh’s penalties.
“Drive killers, man,” he said. “You get a solid run play on the first play of the game, five-yard run, it gets called back. Obviously you can’t point fingers at anybody, but just got to get better. That’s everybody.”
Steelers running back Jaylen Warren actually gained 6 yards on the game’s first play, but as Fautanu said, the play was called back thanks to a hold. A few plays later, a holding call wiped out a 24-yard run. Pittsburgh ended up punting on the drive.
The Steelers finished the first half with eight penalties for 64 yards and were called out by head coach Mike Tomlin at halftime.
“I don’t think we played a great first half. We heard about it in the locker room,” receiver Scotty Miller said. “But we got a little momentum boost at the end of the half and it’s always good to do that.”
While the Steelers played better in the second half, starters were out of the game by that point.
Fautanu was frustrated Pittsburgh didn’t play better with its top players in the game.
“I think we had some solid runs in there. I felt like protection, for the most part, was pretty clean. Obviously a couple of things we’ve gotta clean up,” he said. “But just frustrated we didn’t put any points on the board, you know. As a first offense, going out there, you want to be able to dominate every drive, every rep, you get. So that’s probably the only thing that I would say.
“We didn’t come out and put any points on the board, which is frustrating. But going to continue to build on what we did good today and learn from what we did bad today.”
The Steelers didn’t score on their first three possessions, before finally getting on the board in the second quarter with backups in the game.
The good news is that there is still time to correct mistakes before the regular season opener on Sept. 7 against the Jets.
“We’ve got this week ahead of us, got to compete, play against the defense, which is arguably one of the best defenses in the world,” Fautanu said. “We’ve been going against them in training camp. So I’m excited about this.”
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