Boring football is winning football for the Pittsburgh Steelers (for now)

With some other early season NFL thoughts.

From an X’s and O’s standpoint, and almost certainly from a schematic standpoint, the NFL is a vastly different game from the one that was being played 20-30 years ago.

Formations are different. Personnel packages are different. Plays look different. Players are bigger, faster and stronger. The way we evaluate those players and the teams they play for is dramatically different. Strategy is different as it relates to fourth down attempts and going for two points. Running quarterbacks are no longer an outlier, but are instead something of a necessity with designed quarterback runs being a major part of a team’s offensive identity.

But at its core, and from a big picture perspective, the nuts and bolts of the game are still mostly the same.

The average NFL game scores the same number of points it did 15-20 years ago, while scoring has consistently dropped the past four years. Running the ball effectively and having a good defense will always be a reliable way to win individual games. A great quarterback is still the line in the sand between a bonafide Super Bowl contender and a forgettable Super Bowl pretender.

Those things haven’t changed, and it doesn’t matter how good your team’s scheme is, or how aggressive your coach is, or how analytically inclined your team is, or what matchup problems you can create on individual plays. If you do not have a franchise quarterback, if you can not play play effective defense, and if you can not control the ball when you need to control it you are not going to win a championship.

I bring all of this up because the Pittsburgh Steelers are going into their Week 2 matchup against the Denver Broncos by coming off an ugly, dull and incredibly boring 18-10 slopfest of a win against the Atlanta Falcons. It was a game where the Steelers failed to score a single touchdown and relied exclusively on kicker Chris Boswell to score points (and deliver a clutch fourth quarter punt), while the defense dominated the other side of the ball.

It is a similar recipe for them.

It was also another game where the Steelers’ offensive philosophy was to primarily run the ball, protect the ball and avoid turnovers at all costs and completely ignore the middle of the field in the passing game to a laughable degree. It was not only reminiscent of the passing game we have seen here the past couple of years, it was almost even more extreme as quarterback Justin Fields literally did not attempt a single pass between the hashmarks. The passing chart is amazing to look at (image via Warren Sharp on Twitter)

This is not by accident. This is by design. The Steelers argued after the game that it was to avoid Atlanta’s game-changing safety duo, which is certainly fair. But I can not imagine the passing chart most weeks — and especially as long as Fields is starting — is going to look all that different.

It was not particularly fun to watch, and for as similar as the passing chart might have looked I still think there were some encouraging signs and differences that should stand out as positives.

Let’s talk about them.