I’ve come up with surprisingly little to say about the Steelers after their clash with the Browns yesterday. Surprising, I say, since they came back from a 21-6 halftime deficit to win a game it looked most of the way like they had no business winning. But the Steelers did just what the Steelers always do, in varying degrees:

  • The Steelers’ offensive line is still awful at pass blocking. Ben Roethlisberger was dealing with pressure most of the day from the Browns’ incompetent defensive line. That’s ungood.
  • The Steelers’ defense is still easily picked apart when you pick up their pass rush, which Cleveland consistently did. Derek Anderson missed some open receivers in the second half; more on this in a moment.
  • Daniel Sepulveda is one of the best punters I’ve ever watched, and he’s a rookie. He might eventually stand as the best pick the Steelers made this past draft, which is incredible considering that picks spent on kickers/punters are almost always wasted. Could this be a small paradigm shift?
  • The Steelers’ special teams rank something like 21st in the league by DVOA, and that generally is where they rank (they were a little higher during the Antwaan Randle El era). That’s because they have a good kicker and a great punter; but their kick coverage teams are, and mostly always have been, the very worst in the NFL. It’s been like this forever; the Steelers just don’t care about their kick coverage. And it bit them hard against the Browns, aaaaalmost hard enough to cost them a game they should have won.
  • Ben Roethlisberger pretty much won the game by himself. I can’t name a single other Steeler–okay, I’ll give you Heath Miller–that enjoyed a notably strong game. Hell, Roethlisberger didn’t even play very well by his own standards, and considering this is the Browns’ defense. But it was still enough. He was clearly the best player on the field. This is why teams that have franchise quarterbacks almost always go, very worst, 6-10; franchise QBs win matchups like these by themselves.

The officials actually did OK for most of this game, avoiding the kind of shady penalties that usually help the Steelers win games. I suppose Steelers-Browns just isn’t really important enough for the NFL to worry about helping the Steelers win; after all, they beat the Browns like a drum anyway, every time they play them. The Heath Miller touchdown-upheld-on-review where the ball obviously hit the ground was ridiculous, but that was on second-and-goal from the 1 and the Steelers would probably have scored anyway. That’s minor.

Now, let’s talk about the Browns, because these aren’t the same Browns we’ve gotten used to seeing.

First, the offensive line. I can’t say enough about how impressive the offensive line was. The two teams played on a muddy field, and at game’s end Derek Anderson’s jersey was still sparkling white. I can’t remember any particular instance in which he hit the ground during the game. The pass protection, against a very dangerous Steelers pass rush that has routinely eaten the Browns for breakfast for years, was phenomenal. With a lot of QBs that rarely get sacked, the QB usually has a lot to do with that; for instance, the Colts’ and Patriots’ o-lines have never been notably great at pass blocking. It’s just that Peyton Manning unloads the ball so quickly, and Tom Brady is so good at shifting around the pocket, that they almost never get sacked. The Steelers o-line is the worst in the league at pass blocking, but Ben Roethlisberger is such a skilled escape artist that to the untrained observer it looks like the Steelers’ line is merely mediocre.

The Browns? Derek Anderson has nothing to do with this. It’s all offensive line. Constantly, all day, Anderson had enough time to order dinner for four in the pocket before he had to unload the ball. The Steelers tried lots of different stuff, especially in the second half, varying the number of rushers they sent and where they sent them from. The Browns picked almost all of them up, and made it look easy. In particular, it’s obvious Anderson never even thinks about his blind side. Only half a season into his career, Joe Thomas is already a shut-down left tackle. If you’re lined up across from him, you aren’t getting close enough to the Browns quarterback to smell his sweat.

Aside from the o-line play–or perhaps hand-in-hand with it–the most interesting thing I was watching this game for was to see whether Derek Anderson was a mirage or the real thing. And now there’s no doubt in my mind: Anderson is holding the Browns’ offense back. CBS made much of the first half/second half split, and that is a big deal, but even in the first half, Anderson was completing his passes to wide-open receivers; I counted exactly two passes, out of his 12 completions, in the first half that Anderson made that I probably could not have.

And then in the second half, on the Browns’ first drive the pass protection had a brief lapse and Anderson got hurried a couple of times. Now whether the hurries were the cause or just a coincidence I don’t know, but after that Anderson’s mechanics went haywire and his accuracy completely vanished. He still had open receivers to throw to and plenty of time to find them–again, if you pick up the Steelers’ pass rush, you’ll always find an open receiver–and Anderson just plain missed them. I counted no fewer than six passes in the second half that Anderson missed that any average college QB would be expected to make.

Just a bad game? It’s a possibility, but the little I’ve seen of Anderson before this game tells me no, that Derek Anderson’s effectiveness is a product of the awesome o-line blocking for him and the very easy schedule of pass defenses he’s faced.

The Browns came into this game ranked fifth in the NFL in offense (DVOA), and probably won’t drop but a spot or two after it, considering how highly ranked the Steelers defense is. And I now understand that Derek Anderson has next to nothing to do with it. Jamal Lewis certainly has nothing to do with it, either. Kellen Winslow and Braylon Edwards and the still-underrated Joe Jurevicius do, but 75% of this is their offensive line. It’s probably the best all-around o-line in the league, the kind of line a dynastic offense can be built from (think early-1990s Cowboys.) All the Browns need is a good quarterback, and they’ll have one of the best offenses in the NFL for the next five or six years.

Wouldn’t you know it? The Browns have a potentially great quarterback on their bench, Brady Quinn. Quinn supporters such as myself are gleeful to point to Notre Dame’s current 1-9 record without him this year, and more to the point, Quinn is a first-round QB talent with college numbers that strongly project NFL success. Not necessarily Peyton Manning success, but somewhere north of Eli Manning success. You put that in the Browns’ offense, with that o-line and with those playmakers, and stasrting in 2009 after they’ve unloaded Derek Anderson, the Browns are going to have quite possibly the best offense in the league, non-Colts division.

Brady Quinn is a good NFL quarterback, and will get better with experience. But with the talent he has around him in Cleveland, he has a chance to quickly become a superstar of the first magnitude.

Unfortunately for Browns fans, offense is only one half of the equation. You can have the 2000 Rams offense — the 1999 and 2001 Rams won the NFC championship, but the 2000 edition was their offensive peak and still holds the NFL record for points in a season — and you’re not going to win squat if you have the 2000 Rams defense. The Browns are worse than the 2000 Rams defense, talent-wise; they simply don’t have any plus defensive players. That’s a problem that isn’t getting better anytime in the next two years, minimum.

That’s what made the 1990s Cowboys into a dynasty: They not only had the ridiculous offensive line, but Jimmy Johnson added to it a stud defense, the kind that can beat down the likes of the Buffalo Bills (who were the Colts before the Colts were the Colts, in case you forgot.) The Browns’ defense is in such disarray that they stand in danger of squandering the dynastic offense they’ve put together. Browns’ fans should root for a collapse down the stretch, because Romeo Crennel needs to be shown the door and replaced with a real defensive whiz. Jim Schwartz of the Flaming Thumbtacks comes to mind.

Beyond that, the Browns now have in place an offense that will need little more supplementing–a well placed WR here or RB there or guard over yonder–so they should be focusing their draft picks and free agent money on bolstering the defense.

Or…. well, I’m not a fan of the man, so I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the smartest thing the Browns could do this offseason is pay the $80 million or whatever it will take to bring in Bill Cowher. Heaven knows Cowher has his weakness, but one thing he will doubtlessly do is have the defense turned around inside of one year. It’s a smart move for Cowher, too, exactly because it’s the perfect Tony Dungy 2002 situation: He’d be coming to a team with a great offense already in place, leaving him to devote his energies to rebuilding the defense. Championships would probably be in the future for this marriage.

One problem. One probably fatal problem. Cowher quarrelled several times with his front office fellows in Pittsburgh and will probably demand total control of whatever franchise he goes to. That won’t happen in Cleveland, which has already made a heavy investment in Phil Savage.

So, you can’t get Cowher unless you’re willing to can Savage. Savage has not shown much aplomb when picking head coaches; basically he hired the hottest available coordinator when openings came up, Brian Billick in Baltimore and then Crennel in Cleveland. That could work out well if the hottest coordinator turns out to be Jim Schwartz, but it could work out disastrously if it turns out to be Gregg Williams. Either way, the identity of Cleveland’s head coach in 2008 will tell us whether a Lombardi trophy awaits come about 2009 or 2010.