Unacceptable

What just happened?

I assume a lot of the Black and Gold faithful are talking about the lack of Hines Ward, and the mid-game loss of Troy and even the presence of out former offensive coordinator on the Arizona sidelines as the head coach... however todays loss was simply unacceptable.

What was up with Willie Parker? Last week i finally gave him props as a good running back, as he earned over 100 yards rushing for the third week straight... but today he was unable to hit more than 2 maybe three yards per carry on most runs. What was up with that? I have not looked at the post-game stats but i would guess that he averaged something like 1.8 yards per carry. What the hell?

Ben didn't exactly make me happy. He was sacked several times, and didn't complete a lot of passes. (At one point he was like 0 for his last 8 attempts). However, I am not sure this was entirely his fault, as much as i would like to just blame him.

Ben did seem, however, to be doing relatively well with the play calls he was given/calling (I am not sure who was calling the plays since his helmet is wired). He was avoiding some big sacks, and scrambling well, but for some reason the play calling was terrible. He was way better from the shotgun, but they still lined him up right behind the center on most plays.

Also, once we had established that we were TRYING to use the run-game (although it clearly was not working) we neglected to use play-action when we were throwing to our receivers. How hard is it to fake a hand off to Parker of Davenport? We were giving them the ball on almost every play, and they were not getting anywhere, so why wouldn't we use play action to make the Cardinals bite on the run, and THEN pass down the field.

As for our receivers... groan. Big pathetic groan. Dropping stuff left and right. Roethlisberger had some passes that were border-line perfect, and they couldn't pull them in. Let's face the facts here... Hines has not had all our receptions this year. He is a leader, but I have been impressed with out use of all our receivers. His absence on the field did not warrant this kind of pathetic show of offense. Step it up, boys.

I wrote last week about this being the year of the Tight-Ends so far... what happened to that? I know there are maybe three people who read this blog, and that includes me, so you cannot blame it on me putting it out there, and then Arizona finding out that Miller and Tuman are assets to our offense. (It also sucked that the CBS announcers, Gumble and his cohort, kept calling Miller "Tuman" and vice versa.) We should have been looking to 83 and 84 a whole lot more today to convert our third downs. Again, step it up.

The Alleghetor called his dad at halftime to talk about why were doing so poorly. "We are up by 7 at the half" he said. "You are too high-strung during football games." Oh well... I hate that i am like Nostradamus and i can call a bad game at the half. I can only pray that this was the wake-up call we needed so that we realize we have a long way to go before the playoffs are a reality.


~The Ghetor