I guess I can say it now...

[Oswlek]

It was too bad Roeth picked the worst time to have one of his worst first halves ever. It was also too bad that the refs picked a bad time to forget what offensive holding was (the bogus call on the 2 point conversion and the obvious hold not called on the 4th down conversion.)

 

[Triggerfish]

Triggerfish,

I for one, will not be rubbing it in and I'm sure most the fans here will not. It's good of you to drop by despite last night's game.

I have to agree with most of what you said. But you forget one thing. QBs are by nature an extremely confident lot. They cannot play if they are not confident. That is something Big Ben has and coaches shouldn't do anything to undermine that. Teams feed off the team leader's confidence. This game is as much physical as mental, at least at the NFL level. Having said that, I think he needs to put more into his film study. It looks like he is not really good at running complex a offense. He is one of the best when the play is broken and he has to run around and make a play. In that scenario, he has react rather instinctively and just look for the open man and chuck it down field.

I actually wasn't looking forward to facing the steelers next week. You never know how they are going to come out and play.

Good luck with the off-season.

I agree. A good QB learns from his mistakes and moves on. Dwelling on past mistakes will only damage his confidence, which in turn reflects in his play and causes more mistakes. It kinda becomes a vicious cycle.
This isn't to say that he shouldn't work on improving his game and limiting mistakes, which obviously should be the goal of any athlete. As a coach, it's your responsibility to point out weakness and offer ways to improve them and motivation to continue improving. He's a young QB, and he's going to have some growing pains. I think patience and surrounding him with the right players are the keys to his success. Brady didn't come out of the gates with perfection either. Compare Brady's stats in his 4th year to Ben's:

Brady 2004 - 3,692 yards, 28TDs, 14INTs, 5 fumbles lost

Roethlisberger 2007 - 3,495 yards, 34TDs, 14INTs, 4 fumbles lost

Kinda similar, wouldn't you say? Add to that Ben's 200+ rushing yards and 2TDs this year. Ben was also sacked 53 times to Brady's 26.

All I'm saying is that I'm not worried about Ben. As one of the top 5 ranked QBs in the league, I wouldn't call him a disappointment and he's only going to improve with time.

 

[Triggerfish]

Hmmm...suprised at the lack of comment here. You Pats fans seem to love your stats.

 

[TruthSeeker]

Why take 1 point? It was useless, zero value.
Try the 12 yd 2pt play because if you make it against the odds, the Jags cannot win on a FG. If you miss you're no worse off than if you got 1.
It was the right decision to go for 2.

Now this is funny. Pittsburgh isn't tied at the end of the game precisely because they went for 2 instead of 1 and we still have people saying that the extra point would have been "useless".

I thought Pittsburgh should have gone for 1 from the 2 yard line, but I also thought that you could make a good case for going for 2.

It was plain stupid for Pittsburgh to go for 2 from the 12 yard line (where the chances of getting it can't be better than 20%, probably more like 15%). The actual game itself shows why this was such a poor decision.