TNF: Myles Garrett, snow, fourth downs combine to stop Steelers

The Steelers finally lost a close game, all it took was everything.

Steelers 19 at Browns 24

Because I grew up in Houston, and still live in Houston, I don’t really have a good grasp on when winter starts. It was in the 40s this morning, and that’s about as close as it gets for me most of the time. But the moment that it actually starts feeling like winter is when we get our first snow football game. And after two quarters of mostly innocuous snow, we wound up playing most of the second half in an outright blizzard.

A 19-point game in the snow kind of gets easily colored in to the idea that the Steelers didn’t play very well on offense, but they outgained the Browns by 64 yards and got three turnovers to Cleveland’s one. The answer for Cleveland was simply: Two huge fourth-down stops in the middle of the field changed the game.

The Steelers invented a Justin Fields package for this game! It got them a 30-yard keeper for a big first down. But it also got them, well, this.

Take two, in the third quarter:

That’s former Football Outsiders No. 1 prospect Maurice Hurst on the shed-and-stuff! The Steelers wound up going 1-of-3 on fourth-down go situations. The Browns? Four for four. That about sums up the difference in the scoreline. Weird to say this with four fourth-down gos, but I felt the Browns were almost a little overly cautious at times. (Run on third-and-seven in the red zone?)

It is hard to type nice things about someone who defended Deshaun Watson’s actions and character the way Jameis Winston did — not to imagine his own transgressions at Florida State that were largely swept under the rug — but in an era of boring quarterback play, Winston gives us some spice. Sure, he also gives us some hilarious interceptions. But he’s willing to go downfield and this ball in the snow was phenomenal:

Escape the pocket. See a huge line of zone defenders, loft the ball just above the underneath defender but with enough pace to get it to Jerry Jeudy and not overshoot it to the deep safety. With snow blasting you in the face. You know, easy stuff.

What changes for the Steelers? Not a lot so long as they don’t let this compound into a losing streak. They maintain a one-game lead on the division and if they manage to beat the Ravens again, they’ll hold the head-to-head tiebreak. If they had played poorly, or something had gone wrong, I’d be a little more alarmed. But this felt more like a game where there were four or six key plays and they just couldn’t win on them.

The Browns are now 2-2 since installing Winston as a starter and, weirdly, it is their defense that has disappointed since Watson tore his Achilles. Last year’s No. 2 ranked DVOA defense came into tonight 24th. Other than Jeremiah Owusu-Koromoah, they haven’t really lost anybody else who projected to be a starter for them to a major injury. And yet the sum of the parts has not been what it was last year. The scraps of research I do every weekend just point to “the secondary is not playing well” and “the secondary is not communicating well.” Here again, you saw that when Russell Wilson moonballed Calvin Austin to briefly take the lead.

I’m not going to say that there was a blown coverage on this play — I don’t really know — but what I do know is that your secondary can’t allow a touchdown that easy. Wilson had a defender right in his face on a four-man rush, even, but there was so much space to place this ball that it didn’t really matter.

Wilson was 11-of-12 for 198 yards on third-down passes in this game. (Myles Garrett did sack him three times.) The incomplete pass? On the game-ending Hail Mary. There’s no major takeaway from this that matters for this season with the Browns being 3-8, but watching this game definitely made me feel like the Browns could become an entertaining shootout team for the rest of the season.