Steelers keep their end of bargain, but Dolphins' win will keep them out of playoffs

Just when it looked as if the Pittsburgh Steelers might shuffle off to Buffalo for the most unlikely of playoff appearances, they had their hopes gutted Sunday with the ferocity of Lucy yanking a football away from Charlie Brown.

The Steelers held up their end of the bargain with a 28-14 victory against the Cleveland Browns at Acrisure Stadium, but they didn’t get enough help from outside sources and will be watching the postseason instead of participating in it.

“We got the win, but, obviously, not the result we wanted,” quarterback Kenny Pickett said. “We wanted a shot at the playoffs. It didn’t work out that way, so there are a little bit of mixed feelings.”

The Steelers, who had a 0.2% chance of making the playoffs a few weeks ago, needed to win their fourth game in a row to stay alive. They also needed Miami and New England to lose their games that kicked off at 1 p.m.

Buffalo defeated New England, 35-23, but Miami got a go-ahead field goal from Jason Sanders with 18 seconds left and defeated the New York Jets, 11-6.

That result gave the AFC’s seventh seed to the Dolphins instead of the Steelers.

“It’s hard to fully understand that we don’t have a game this week,” outside linebacker T.J. Watt said. “I think it will take a little bit of time to understand and come to terms with it. I felt like we were just starting to play some really damn good football.”

The Steelers not only ended the season on a four-game winning streak to finish 9-8, they won six of their last seven and went 7-2 after the bye week to correct a 2-6 start. They also extended coach Mike Tomlin’s streak of consecutive non-losing seasons to 16 and avoided the franchise’s first losing season since 2003.

“Too little, too late this year,” Watt said. “There’s a lot to build on. Very proud of the guys in the locker room. It would have been easy to fold it in and start to wonder why this is happening to us and pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nobody did that.”

Unlike the previous two weeks, the Steelers didn’t need any last-minute heroics from Pickett to pull out a victory. What they did need was to overcome a slow start as a series of first-half mistakes resulted in an early 7-0 deficit before they regrouped and scored 20 unanswered points.

Pickett had 195 yards passing, including a 31-yard touchdown strike to George Pickens late in the first half. For the seventh time in eight starts since the bye, he didn’t throw an interception.

Najee Harris had a game-high 84 yards rushing to go over 1,000 for the season. He scored a rushing touchdown, as did fullback Derek Watt, to help the Steelers score their most points in a victory this season.

“We lack experience in some areas, but we’re good enough to win and good enough to win while we grow,” Tomlin said. “We’re good enough to win while we gain experience. We didn’t grade this group on a curve.”

A defense that benefited from Watt’s midseason return from a torn pec injury, sacked Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson seven times and intercepted him twice, turning those takeaways into 10 points.

Alex Highsmith had two sacks to give him 14 1/2 in a breakthrough third NFL season. Heyward got two, including one on the final snap, to give him 10 1/2.

It also marked the seventh game in a row the Steelers didn’t allow an opponent to score more than 17 points in a game.

“Through the bumps and rocky roads everybody stuck together and tried to get better,” Heyward said.

Those problems resurfaced in the first half Sunday. Harris lost a fumble at the goal line trying to dive in for a score, and he had a 45-yard reception on another series wiped out by an illegal-man-downfield penalty.

The Browns took a 7-0 lead on Watson’s 10-yard touchdown pass to David Njoku. The Steelers countered late in the half on Pickett’s touchdown pass to Pickens on a third-and-15 laser down the middle.

Levi Wallace intercepted Watson two plays later, and the Steelers turned that into a 49-yard Chris Boswell field goal 38 seconds before halftime.

After intermission, the Steelers got a 34-yard kick from Boswell. Damontae Kazee intercepted Watson on the next series, and the Steelers took a 20-7 lead on Harris’ 4-yard touchdown run.

Watson’s 2-yard touchdown pass to Nick Chubb pulled the Browns within six, but Pickett had three third-down completions when the Steelers needed at least 8 yards to move the chains. This set up Derek Watt’s touchdown and a 2-point conversion pass to Diontae Johnson with 4:37 to play.

All that remained was for the Steelers to see if they would get some favorable results on the out-of-town scoreboard that would send them to Buffalo in the wild-card round.

“All we could focus on was winning this game,” Heyward said. “Obviously, we needed help, and you never want to give another team control of your destiny.”