Mike Tomlin Says Steelers Were ‘JV’ in Loss to Texans

PITTSBURGH — To say the least, the Pittsburgh Steelers had an abysmal outing in Friday night’s 20-12 loss to the Houston Texans at Acrisure Stadium. The final score wasn’t a true indication of how poorly the Steelers played. There was a lot of self-inflicted woes and missed opportunities. It was just a lackadaisical performance, and head coach Mike Tomlin was certainly not pleased.

“Really a sloppy performance, to be honest with you,” Tomlin said in his post-game press conference. “It’s capable of happening, obviously, in the first preseason game, but not that we find comfort in that. We work too hard to have the results that we had tonight, so it’s disappointing. How we work off of it obviously will define us, and we’ll have a good rep at responding to negativity as we push into our next opportunity.”

Overall, Mike Tomlin thought it was a JV performance on offense, defense and special teams. He especially ripped into the special teams unit.

“Just looking at it from a special teams perspective, the field position and points standpoint was JV,” Tomlin said. “We had a block in the back on a kickoff return, from a field position perspective. We ran out of bounds without being forced on a punt that provided awesome field position for them. We had a bad snap on an extra point. We muffed a punt that produced seven points. So, you can’t play football like that and think you’re gonna be in games. Really, it was amazing that we had the ball in a one-score game at the end when you consider those things.

“On offense and defense, I thought we were JV on possession down football. Maybe 1 of 7 at one point on offense. Not good enough. A couple of those were sacks. We had them in third-and-long several times on defense, man, and we lost. We lost those downs. We gave up a touchdown on a third-and-long in the safety rotation. So there’s some things that we got to do better. Some things that we got to tighten up.”

The Steelers will be back at Saint Vincent College on Sunday to finish their final week of training camp. As Tomlin noted, there’s a lot to clean up.

Alan Saunders contributed reporting from Pittsburgh.