NFL Week 7 reactions and overreactions

Mike Tomlin does not want to see Joe Flacco, the Seattle Seahawks with a masterclass in roster management and the AFC is still going to go through the Kansas City Chiefs.

Checking in with some thoughts from around the NFL this week.

1. I am not really surprised the Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Cincinnati Bengals on Thursday night. I can not say I expected it. But I am not surprised by it. Short weeks in the NFL are tough. Short weeks against a divisional opponent are tough. Short weeks against a division opponent on the road are extremely tough. And while Mike Tomlin has become completely dominant after bye weeks and when he has extra time to prepare for an opponent, his team is equally incompetent with a short week. He is now 0-7 on short-week road games against a division opponent. That is an oddly specific set of circumstances, but it is pretty clear something breaks in the operation in those games.

It happened again, and resulted in them wasting a prime opportunity to really put some distance between them and the rest of the AFC North.

Still, I always thought a very Steelers thing to do would be to lose to Cincinnati and then come back the next week and beat the Green Bay Packers.

They have the rest advantage over the Packers. They tend to play well in primetime games at home. The Packers also are not really passing the vibe check for me this season. They seem to have more paper champion vibes than Super Bowl champion vibes.

2. While I am not surprised the Steelers lost to the Bengals, I am surprised with the way they lost.

I figured if they were going to lose it would be an ugly rock-fight where the offense looked incompetent, they had a couple of turnovers and you walked away from the game counting the missed opportunities the offense had in some kind of 18-14 bore that left everybody asking why they spent three hours of their lives watching it.

While they did have a couple of turnovers (and lost the turnover fight 2-0), the offense more than held up its end of the bargain. They were actually pretty good for most of the night.

Jaylen Warren had a monster game (and I did not think they used him enough). Pat Freiermuth came out of his early season hibernation and was a force. The Franken-Tight End was again a force to be reckoned with, combining for 11 catches, 142 yards and FOUR touchdowns. Wide receiver Roman Wilson even showed up on the field and made some positive contributions to offer some glimpse of hope that maybe his selection was not a waste.

If you had told me on Thursday morning that Aaron Rodgers would throw for four touchdowns and the Steelers were going to score 31 points I would have chalked up a win and had them at 5-1 and sitting pretty in the AFC.

I was not anticipating the defense absolutely defecating all over itself.

Especially not after the way they played in the previous two games against Minnesota and Cleveland.

And while those games do come with the asterisk of playing against Carson Wentz and Dillon Gabriel, they still did a lot of positive things in both games. It seemed to be a sign of them shaking off some early season issues and starting to play the way they are supposed to play.

And then a 40-year-old Joe Flacco absolutely cooked them. If Flacco and the Bengals would have needed 50 points to win that game, I have no doubt they would have been able to do it.

3. So what do we make of this defense at this point? I hate to be a prisoner of the moment and overreact to a bad game, and I think one of the most aggravating things about the way we consume sports now is how hot-and-cold we run with our opinions. Especially in the face of a loss. When a team wins a game — and this is not Steelers specific, this is across all sports and all teams that I have noticed — it almost seems to be greeted more with apathy and a sense of, “well, you were supposed to do that” as opposed to general excitement and happiness. But when it team loses it is greeted with scorn, vitriol, anger and non-stop finger pointing and screaming until the next win.

We overreact to the most recent bad result.

But for this defense it wasn’t really a one-time thing for this season or a random mid-season slip-up.

It’s been a trend.

The only quarterback they have shut down this season is Gabriel, who might actually stink and plays for a team that definitely stinks.

Pretty much everybody else has put up numbers against them. Big numbers. And they have not exactly played a who’s who list of elite quarterbacks yet. The big boys are still looming on the schedule, and if you can not stop Justin Fields and Joe Flacco, what are Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson going to do to you? Especially if you can not consistently and effectively stop the run?

Even if the Steelers have struggled against the top-tier quarterbacks in recent years, they pretty much always dominated the second, third and fourth-tier guys. Even those guys are finding success against them this season.

The schedule gets significantly tougher over the next few weeks, but the next two game are at home. These two games will be a good indicator of what direction the season is going to take.

4. The only other thing I will say about Thursday’s game is I thought Tomlin set a bad tone for the game during his Tuesday press conference when he complained about Cleveland trading Joe Flacco to Cincinnati.

Two things can be true at the same time:

• His burn of Andrew Berry and the Browns was objectively funny

• It also sent a horrible message

That’s the type of thing Tomlin isn’t supposed to care about. That’s the type of thing you never hear from him. What happened to the “we do not care” mindset? What happened to nameless, gray faces? It just seemed like Flacco ending up in Cincinnati threw off everything about his mindset of the game and struck real, legitimate fear deep into his soul.

It was honestly baffling.

I know he has a ton of respect for Flacco, and I know Flacco has had some success against the Steelers in the past, but a 40-year-old Flacco should not have caused that much panic within the walls of the Steelers facility. They also should not have allowed him to dominate them so effortlessly. I know Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins are outstanding, but that still should not be happening.

Now, to talk about the rest of the NFL, including the Kansas City Chiefs being the team to beat in the AFC, how the Seattle Seahawks turned themselves back into a Super Bowl contender with some really shrewd and outstanding quarterback moves, and the team that might be the best in the NFC.