OK, I admit it, I am in no position to write a solid fanpost right now, but I do want to vent a bit.

After all I just gave up my Sunday afternoon - which I really, really needed for work, to watch this team play on a crappy little internet stream.

I had originally planned on not watching. I considered this a fool proof plan. If we won the game, then no biggie - it's the Raiders at home in a must win situation, really no chance they come out flat and blow it.  On the other hand, if by some strange break of events they did manage to find a way to lose, then I knew I wanted no part of watching it.  

 Anyway, good plan - poor execution.  Sort of like Dick Lebeau's defense in the fourth quarter. Like a fool I watched. Now it's 5:00 and I haven't done a shred of work, and I am feeling mad. Real mad.

What can you possibly say about losing to the Raiders at home? I will give to the Raiders that they are playing much better football since they benched Jamarcus Russel - and they have beaten two teams with better records than the Steelers - but let's be honest - I don't think many of us thought the Steelers were going to blow a must win, at home, in December against a 3-8 team.  But this ain't your 08 Steelers.  So what happened.

1. Same old same old - but worse.  Sadly, with the lone exception of Special Teams (welcome back Anthony Madison) every single thing that contributed to this loss has been a regular pattern for the 09 Steelers.  In what has become one of the strangest patterns I've seen from a football team in my life, the Steelers consistently outplay the opposition for 3 quarters and manage to lose the game in the fourth.  Part of that comes from not closing out in the first three, but really what it comes down to is not getting it done when the game is on the line.

What made this loss more stunning was the severity of the defenisve melt-down in the fourth quarter.  It was infact the second time this season the Steelers have given up 21 points in the fourth quarter. The first time, in San Diego however, it was hard to fault the defense. This time the 21 was entirely a failure on the defensive side of the ball.  What's more to put it into perspective Oakland had not yet scored 21 points in a game this entire season - not once!

2. The Defense - In the wake of this game there was a ton of chatter on the boards about firing Bruce Arians.  Let me be clear, I am all for it.I think Bruce Arians called yet another uninspired game, left points on the field, asked big Ben to do too much, etc. etc. But let's also be clear, Bruce Arians is NOT THE REASON the Steelers lost this game.

The collapse here was a defensive collapse pure and simple. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we fire Dick Lebeau. That would be stupid.  But I do think it's some time to do some serious, serious soul searching about what's happening on these fourth quarter chokes. I think a very large part of this is on the players, but I also think Lebeau's legendary status has insulated him from criticism.  You will notice that after three quarter of domination - it seems that Offensive coordinators are simply figuring out how to solve the Steelers come the fourth quarter. If it happens once or twice during the season you shrug it off.  But six times?  You have to start asking questions. 

Having said that, I think that it's fairly clear that, Lebeau is missing his weapons in Troy, McFadden and Smith and is playing with a secondary that is untalented and uninspired at this point.

Let's start with the secondary:  Ike Taylor, far from being the shutdown corner that he was last year, has made  tons of big mistakes in coverage. Costly PI penalties, poor reads such as letting Murphy take the inside with no safety help and of course his hands are so bad you wouldn't allow him to play right field in little league.

William Gay, is much worse.  We have watched Gay's struggles throughout the year. This game was simply embaressing. On almost every play that we saw him, Gay was sitting on his but, having slipped on the field. Now granted it's a bad field and I think that we should recognize that as part of the culprit in the poor secondary play. Still all in all Gay was going against two guys who had barely NFL experience.  Higgins and Schilens between them had 13 catches this season for a total of 149 yards. Today going mostly against Gay they tallied 7 catches for 108.  Murphy tallied another 4 catches for 128 yards - not sure how many of those apart from the big 75 yarder came against the safeties and how many against Ike. 

I am not sure what else to say without watching the game again.None of the safeties looked good, and I didn't see much of Desehea out there. It's clear that this team misses Troy in a big way, but that kind of drop off is simply not acceptable. This was the Raiders not the Colts and we were facing Brad Gradowski throwing to a bunch of no name recievers not Manning, Brady or Brees.

One thing I will say in defense of the Steelers Seconday is the Gradowski did a great job of extending plays and making guys miss. In some ways he was just as effective as Ben on a good day at making something out of what should have been an easy sack.  Still in that situation you would hope that Lebeau does a good job of making adjustments in the fourth quarter to make sure that we stay on top. 

3. The offense.  While this loss is clearly the fault of the defensive collapse in the fourth quarter, the offense and the coaching are also culpable.  In the first 3 quarters the Steelers left a minimum of 9 points on the board, enough to put the game fairly under control.  Let's look at each of those plays. 

4th and 1 inside the ten and the Steelers elect to run a QB sneak. It's hard to fault Tomlin for taking this gamble. He wants to be agressive, he wants to set the tone. Still anytime you leave points on the board in the NFL it should be considered a fairly big failure. I won't say that it was the wrong call, but it did prove to be very costly. Prognosis - Tough call, but the Steelers played the odds and lost.

The Ben interception. Driving late in the 2nd quarter the Steelers found themselves on the Raiders 16 with 300 minutes left. With plenty of time to throw Ben made a bad read and a bad throw for Hines in the back of the endzone. It's not at all clear what Ben saw on that play but the ball was Behind Ward and picked off by Eugune who Ben never saw on the play. It was simply a careless play and it cost the Steelers at least 3 points. Prognosis: Ben has to take much better care of the ball inside the 20.

The last play was the Ben Sack on 3rd and 6 at the Oakland 25.  This is the kind of play that has been killing us all year, and that Ben and the Offensive line and Arians simply have to account for better. If Ben had somehow managed to pick throw the ball away on this play, Reed has a very managable 44 yard field goal. Instead, he is forced to try a 53 yarder into the open end of the stadium.  The miss set's up great field position for the Raiders and leads them to their first TD of the game. 

I see this game killing sequence as a tragic failure on the part of three people, Ben, Bruce Arians and Mike Tomlin. Let's start with Arians.  We are on the 26 with an opprotunity to put up points to start the fourth quarter.  This is one of those situation where the coaching staff has to make smart situational choices. You absolutely want to get the first down, but you simply cannot afford to not pick up the field goal. There are only two unaccaptable results here - either a turnover or a sack that drives you out of range. It's hard to know what the play call was, but it certainly seemed like a pass that was going to take a couple of second to develop.

For his part Ben (and the O-Line) simply fail to recognize the blitzer before it's too late.  I would have to see the play again to know who is really to blame, but I can't help but think that Arians did not give his guys a chance to succeed by dialing up that kind of play. Ultimately, you also have to question Tomlin's decision to let Reed kick from that spot.  Once again it seems that tomlin is playing his gut and not the safe, smart and sometimes unpopular percentages. At that point I think you have to punt.

All in all in a game where you throw for nearly 300 and run for over a 100 you should be able to smile as an offense - so give BA and Ben some credit. But in the end it's hard to ignore that when things really counted, with the ball deep in the opponents side of the field, Ben, BA and Tomlin collectively managed to leave a whole bunch of points on the field.  Points that likely would have won the game. 

Conclusions on the wall:

Well, I think I am more or less done venting.

I will say this. It's a perplexing team. I think that if you look at it objectively, this team is really more talented on offense than the team that won last year.

On the defensive side of the ball, it's clear that the absence of McFadden and Troy, and to a lesser extent Aaron Smith have hurt this team a tremendous amount.  Without them we have simply been incapable of making the plays that would have been the margin of victory.

One of the most troubling questions for me remains - are we being out-coached?  While Bruce Arians has been our favorite whipping boy for two seasons here, I think the bigger question is are we losing the mind battles with opposing OC's in the fourth quarter or is simply a matter of not having the weapons to fight against the pass rush.  I do think it's more of the latter, but I don't think that this can be put entirely on them. Before you shout me down, I think LeBeau is a genius, but I do think that the defense he runs requires a much better secondary than he has - and it's showing in a big, big way this season - and he has failed to adjust for this.  As I said above, 21 points against the Raiders in the fourth is simply an embarressment.

I don't yet know what it means for the future, but I think it's pretty clear that this team is on life support right now. The strangest thing is that it's dying in large part from self-inflicted wounds.  The Steelers have simply been out played and out coached in the fourth quarter of games against inferior opponents. 

I can't help but wonder if William Gay has seen his last game as a starter this year. I think that if we lose to Cleveland (and yes, it absolutely can happen) or even if we don't we may see a big shake-up in the secondary.