The Steelers lost their fourth straight game on Sunday afternoon when Ezekiel Elliott scored two touchdowns in the final two minutes of a seesaw game to make the Cowboys 35-30 winners on the road.
Those two scoring drives covered 150 yards and the Cowboys ended the afternoon with 422 yards on a day when they made big plays through the air and on the ground with regularity. That left linebacker James Harrison to say, via Aditi Kinkhabwala of NFL Media, that the defense is “totally s-----" and “quite terrible” in an assessment that’s unlikely to find too many detractors in light of Sunday’s performance.
Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger had a similar opinion of the entire team, calling them “undisciplined and not accountable” in his postgame comments that were searching for an answer to stopping the team’s slide.
“I don’t know,” Roethlisberger said, via ESPN.com. “Is it players? Is it coaches? I don’t know, but we need to get there quick.”
No one has run away with the AFC North, but that’s small consolation for a Steelers team that’s regularly on the wrong side of big plays and prone to mistakes like a facemask call on the final Cowboys drive that help hand games away. If those things aren’t cleaned up, the division and any playoff hopes will disappear whether or not the Ravens or Bengals take control.
