Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin got brutally honest about his team’s embarrassing defeat to the Washington Football Team on Monday.
“I live by the coaching creed, ‘If you can’t get a yard, you don’t deserve to win,'” he said.
“That was the case for us in this game. We had several sequences where we had an opportunity if we gained a yard, it was significant in terms of the development of the outcome of the game, but we were unsuccessful.”
The loss was Pittsburgh’s first of the year, and dashed hopes of a potential perfect season.
“If you can’t get a yard in our game, you don’t deserve to win,” Tomlin continued.
“That’s the nuts and bolts elements of football, the physicality element of football. We didn’t meet that challenge, so we have some work to do in that area.”
Pittsburgh was without center Maurkice Pouncey and lead running back James Conner in this one, but Tomlin refused to use that as an excuse.
“If you’re a legit unit, if you’re a unit that has the goods, you can absorb irregularities in schedules, players — significant players — missing and so forth and still rise up in those moments,” Tomlin said. “That’s our charge as we prepare for this next game. … We’ve lost fluidity since we missed some of those guys.
“To be quite honest with you, that pisses me off because we have to be the type of group that endures regardless of who is available. That’s how we construct this group, not only in terms of our acquisition of players but just development of mentality and personality.”
Next up for the Steelers: a showdown this weekend versus a very scrappy Buffalo Bills squad.
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