Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

[Flasteel]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

I'm not sure what it'll be, but I'd be willing to bet that it's made by Troy and it comes in the 4th quarter.

[Jooser]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game







You tell 'em I'm coming, you hear me. I'm coming, and hell's coming with me!!!!!!



LOL, the fantasy continues......

[Discipline of Steel]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

4th quarter, we are down by 6 with 2:00 to go and we are forced to put from our end of the field. James Harrison reprises on the punt coverage squad and plants Reed on his rear end, causing a rainbow fumble. Pittsburgh recovers but Harrison is ejected for landing on the player with his full body weight, and then some. The Steelers rally around their martyr, and score the go-ahead TD for the win. James Harrison calmly tells the press afterward, "We did what we had to do to get the job done."

[ALLD]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

Todd Heap comes across the middle and makes a catch. Ryan Clark hits him so hard that his head flies off his body still in the helmet. Casey Hampton runs back a 40 yard TD.

[MeetJoeGreene]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

Steelernation1 and crew shake their brand new sign so vigorously that it breaks free from its moorings. It is caught by a gust of wind and blows onto the field entrapping Flacco, Rice, Boldin, and Mason. They get tangled and fall a Heap into Todd Heap. They all sustain High Ankle sprains.

Ray Ray pulls out some knives and heads towards the rotunda looking for revenge. Steely McBeam does a flying dropkick hitting Ray Ray in the face. He stabs himself in the shoulder.

TJ Whosyourmamma begins yelling at the crowd. He is encircled by 10000 Steeler fans with terrible towels. They all take turns snapping him until he is one big massive douchtasic welt.

[SidSmythe]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

About to be sacked by Suggs, Ben slips and throws a lame duck to Miller. The throw is intercepted by Ed Reed. Reed breaks for the EZ, but there's still one Steeler to beat. Oh good lord, he's wearing number 86. Scared senseless, Reed returns the ball to the wrong EZ for a Steelers safety, and the Steelers get the ball back. The play goes down in NFL history as the Immaculate Hershey Squirt. k, I'm done.

LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i can't stop laughing!!! hahahahahahaha...how dumb!! LOL

[SidSmythe]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

after the "Immaculate Hershey Squirt" we have the ball on the
Ravens 30 yard line up by 2 (from the Immaculate Hershey Squirt)
4th & inches, not risking a FG we go for it
Legursky up the middle for 30 yards and a Steeler TD

[SteelCrazy]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

We are up by 5 with 19 seconds to go. Flacco drops back, heaves the ball 56 yards to Boldin and he runs 24 YAC. Just as he is about to cross the goal line Troy knocks the ball out of his grasp and it goes through the end zone. No touchdown and we get the ball on the 20 with 1 second left......

[Doyle37]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

We are up by 5 with 19 seconds to go. Flacco drops back, heaves the ball 56 yards to Boldin and he runs 24 YAC. Just as he is about to cross the goal line Troy knocks the ball out of his grasp and it goes through the end zone. No touchdown and we get the ball on the 20 with 1 second left......

This might be better if it were Doucheyourmomma instead of Boldin.

[hawaiiansteel]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

On Saturday, Explosive Plays Could Make Difference

Posted on January 11, 2011 by JJ


Sunday night, Lance Williams of Steel Curtain Radio, Michael Bean of Behind The Steel Curtain and I had a very interesting discussion about Saturday’s Armageddon. It was planned to be a podcast, but unfortunately some technical issues with the recording meant it was just three guys talking Steelers instead.

But even with the recording not working, it was a fun talk, and it brought up some interesting points. One of the most salient was a conversation we had about what the Steelers have to do to win this game. Obviously this is about as evenly matched as a game can be — the last four Steelers-Ravens games have all been decided by a field goal — so there was some thought that it will be the team who makes fewer mistakes will be the one who pulls out the win.

There’s some truth to that — if Joe Flacco had realized Troy Polamalu was coming off his blind side unblocked, the Ravens could have won the most recent matchup. But to me, there’s something even more important. What I’ll be looking for is how many big plays the Steelers can come up with on offense. I think that’s just as important as limiting mistakes.

Let me make it clear. It’s not my idea, it’s Bill Walsh’s. In his outstanding book “Finding The Winning Edge,” Walsh has an entire chapter about putting together a gameplan. In it, one of the his bullet points is that a team needs to generate explosive plays to gain an advantage. As Walsh explained it, an explosive play is any offensive play that gains 20 or more yards. According to the stats at the time Walsh wrote his book (1997), teams that had a two-explosive-play or more advantage over their opponent won 80-85 percent of the time.

That intrigued me, so I compiled the numbers for the eight remaining playoff teams. What I found was that in that admittedly small sample size were very similar stats. With +2 explosive play differential (what Walsh was aiming for), the eight remaining teams are winning 88 percent of their games. With a +1 to -1 differential, the teams are winning 71.5 percent of their games (right in line with their 70 percent winning percentage for the season). And when the have a -2 explosive play differential, the playoff teams are winning only 48 percent of the time.

In the five games where the Steelers have gotten the big-play edge on the Ravens, they’ve won. In the six games they’ve failed to get the big-play edge, they are 1-5. So if the Steelers want to win, getting Mike Wallace, Emmanuel Sanders or Heath Miller deep will be a key factor.

[url="http://www.steelerslounge.com/2011/01/saturday-explosive-plays-difference/"]http://www.steelerslounge.com/2011/01/s ... ifference/[/url]

[SanAntonioSteelerFan]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

On Saturday, Explosive Plays Could Make Difference

Posted on January 11, 2011 by JJ


Sunday night, Lance Williams of Steel Curtain Radio, Michael Bean of Behind The Steel Curtain and I had a very interesting discussion about Saturday’s Armageddon. It was planned to be a podcast, but unfortunately some technical issues with the recording meant it was just three guys talking Steelers instead.

But even with the recording not working, it was a fun talk, and it brought up some interesting points. One of the most salient was a conversation we had about what the Steelers have to do to win this game. Obviously this is about as evenly matched as a game can be — the last four Steelers-Ravens games have all been decided by a field goal — so there was some thought that it will be the team who makes fewer mistakes will be the one who pulls out the win.

There’s some truth to that — if Joe Flacco had realized Troy Polamalu was coming off his blind side unblocked, the Ravens could have won the most recent matchup. But to me, there’s something even more important. What I’ll be looking for is how many big plays the Steelers can come up with on offense. I think that’s just as important as limiting mistakes.

Let me make it clear. It’s not my idea, it’s Bill Walsh’s. In his outstanding book “Finding The Winning Edge,” Walsh has an entire chapter about putting together a gameplan. In it, one of the his bullet points is that a team needs to generate explosive plays to gain an advantage. As Walsh explained it, an explosive play is any offensive play that gains 20 or more yards. According to the stats at the time Walsh wrote his book (1997), teams that had a two-explosive-play or more advantage over their opponent won 80-85 percent of the time.

That intrigued me, so I compiled the numbers for the eight remaining playoff teams. What I found was that in that admittedly small sample size were very similar stats. With +2 explosive play differential (what Walsh was aiming for), the eight remaining teams are winning 88 percent of their games. With a +1 to -1 differential, the teams are winning 71.5 percent of their games (right in line with their 70 percent winning percentage for the season). And when the have a -2 explosive play differential, the playoff teams are winning only 48 percent of the time.

In the five games where the Steelers have gotten the big-play edge on the Ravens, they’ve won. In the six games they’ve failed to get the big-play edge, they are 1-5. So if the Steelers want to win, getting Mike Wallace, Emmanuel Sanders or Heath Miller deep will be a key factor.

[url="http://www.steelerslounge.com/2011/01/saturday-explosive-plays-difference/"]http://www.steelerslounge.com/2011/01/s ... ifference/[/url]

This is very encouraging, because I think we can do just that.

It will be a somewhat challenging game plan to put together though, because I think we will need a ton of short passing routes to keep their defense out of Ben's helmet.

Pulling for you, BA, pulling for you!

[hawaiiansteel]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

Collier: New menu for a feast

Thursday, January 13, 2011
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


We learned this week that when it comes to adjectives, Ben Roethlisberger prefers instinctual to instinctive, twice in one sentence invoking the former to describe the defensive reactions of the Baltimore Ravens.

"There are two great defenses involved," said No. 7 said of the AFC playoff game Saturday, "so, to me, it's about what offense is going to make a mistake or not make it."

And that shrewd assessment likely is more descriptive than either instinctual or instinctive, as it illuminates the veteran quarterback's broader understanding that these Steelers-Ravens free-for-alls generally turn on a single mistake.

The costliest on record was the pass Joe Flacco threw to Troy Polamalu the night of Jan. 18, 2009, the one the inimitable safety returned to a bird-breaking touchdown in the AFC championship game.

It's a shame, in one sense, that as well as the games in this ultra-violent series have been played, all seem to turn on somebody screwing something up.

"That's just the way we look at it," said defensive end Nick Eason. "We're always harping around here on little things. One little thing, one little mistake can come back and bite you."

One little thing too often has proven to be exactly enough to tilt the Steelers-Baltimore dynamic fatefully, so much so that you can't help but wonder if bigger things might soon come into play.

Things as big as Todd Heap, for example, the 6-foot-5 tight end who missed all but the first series of plays in the previous meeting between these teams, then turned up catching 10 passes for 108 yards in Baltimore's playoff opener at Kansas City last week. Heap is just the sixth tight end in the past 44 years to catch 10 balls for more than 100 yards in a playoff game.

"When he's healthy, he's a threat," Steelers corner Ike Taylor said Wednesday "You've always gotta be aware of where he's at because [Joe] Flacco is a good quarterback. If he sees a hole, he's gonna throw it in there."

Flacco is himself a bigger thing than ever. He's not Roethlisberger, but he is closer to that plateau than he has been. Ray Rice, the only human to gain 100 yards rushing against the Steelers in their past 50 games, also looks more dangerous than ever.

"They've been a better team than they've been in the past," said Eason. "They added [Anquan] Boldin and [T.J.] Houshmanzadeh this year. They've really established a lot of things."

And we haven't talked instinctualness yet. The entire defense is riding the emotional momentum of Terrell Suggs, who in consistently posing questions for which offenses have no answers. Suggs spent nearly as much time in the Steelers' backfield Dec. 5 in Baltimore as Rashard Mendenhall.

For all the we-know-them-and-they-know-us rhetoric filling both locker rooms in the ramp-up, Mike Tomlin warned only in passing the other day that the Ravens are perfectly capable of, as he put it, "flipping the script."

So, yeah, I'm starting to gather that these Ravens are a difficult assignment for a team that has not beaten an accomplished opponent in six weeks, even when it happened to be the Ravens, who just happened to be the team making the one offensive mistake that night, the one that proved fateful.

That's the polite way to describe it. The impolite way is probably that it was the stupidest play of the season in which Flacco turned his back to a blitz-showing Troy Polamalu with a four-point lead in the fourth quarter.

I don't look for that degree of brain cramp from John Harbaugh's team any time soon.

In a far more abstract sense, flipping the script might mean it is time we wondered about the durability of some themes we've just grown accustomed to around here, because playoff folklore isn't permanent. It is up for peer review every January.

The Steelers are 8-0 in the playoffs against division opponents and 8-0 in the playoffs against teams they were meeting for the third time in the same season. In those eight third-meeting games, stretching back to January 1979, the Steelers won by an average of two touchdowns.

Those elements are part of a larger historical script that will get flipped one of these days. One cold day probably. Maybe with the Heinz Field lights blazing over the mud and the snow. I'm not really at all sure that day isn't just about here.

Read more: [url="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11013/1117582-150.stm#ixzz1AxLzdGvZ"]http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11013/11 ... z1AxLzdGvZ[/url]

[RuthlessBurgher]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

First, Antonio Cromartie calls Tom Brady an a-hole.

Now, it looks like Ike Taylor is saying the same thing about Flacco.

"When he's healthy, he's a threat," Steelers corner Ike Taylor said Wednesday "You've always gotta be aware of where he's at because [Joe] Flacco is a good quarterback. If he sees a hole, he's gonna throw it in there."

[sentinel33]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

Timmons fills his stat line.

[hawaiiansteel]

Re: Predict the BIG PLAY of Saturday's Game

First, Antonio Cromartie calls Tom Brady an a-hole.

Now, it looks like Ike Taylor is saying the same thing about Flacco.

"When he's healthy, he's a threat," Steelers corner Ike Taylor said Wednesday "You've always gotta be aware of where he's at because [Joe] Flacco is a good quarterback. If he sees a hole, he's gonna throw it in there."

a hole = Raven receivers