Yahoo Sports’ Jason Fitz and senior NFL writer Frank Schwab discuss how Pittsburgh performed behind the veteran quarterback in his first start of the season. Hear the full conversation on “Good Word with Goodwill” and subscribe on , or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
The story of this game.
I think you’re right.
Is Frank, frankly, Russ came in and the Steelers looked reenergized.
Uh their offense looked easier, everything had better rhythm.
It’s like all of a sudden, I looked at that and said, this makes sense.
I didn’t say that to the Jets.
I am saying that for the Steelers because their line played better, the run game was stronger.
I think the broadcast made a strong point that as much as we thought of Justin Fields as being a huge part of the running game, maybe having a more viable threat as a passer creates a better running game by nature that we saw that too.
Absolutely.
And you gotta give my Tomlin a ton of credit.
This is why Tomlin is a great coach.
He is, is why he’s probably going to Hall of Fame someday.
He has a Hall of Fame resume.
If you look at it, look, I scoffed at it.
I think you did too.
Kind of this whole idea of like he was just going to play Russ like he just had his mindset.
It’s like March, I’m gonna play Russ and it just seemed like he was being really stubborn with this.
And even this week, I think it was Jay Glazer who said, like, Mike Tomlin told him, I just went lone Ranger on this.
This was my II I wanted to do this and he kinda just like, what’s Tomlin thinking?
Like we’ve seen Russ the past couple of years, we saw him in the preseason.
Russell doesn’t have anything left.
Well, this is why Mike Tomlin’s a great coach.
This was the right button to push Russell could like, yeah, he started slow but he hadn’t played in six weeks.
It’s understandable why he started a little slow once he got going.
He’s throwing balls up to George Pickens who was making great contested catches, he’s spreading the ball around the whole offense, like you said, kind of flow through that even the running game gets going.
This was a different Steelers offense.
This was the best Steelers offensive performance we’ve seen.
And again, I, I just go back to Mike Tomlin making a move.
That wasn’t easy.
This, it would have been so easy for him to just say we’re winning with Justin Fields just gonna stick with the status quo because we’re winning when he saw it.
He said Justin has done his job filling in for Russ, but he’s deficient in the passing game and we need more out of that.
So we need to turn to Russ who still has something left.
I believe in this guy and he was.
Right.