Say what you will about Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster and his “the Browns is the Browns” quote.
You may think that line was destructive bulletin board material before a playoff game. Or you may consider it a fleeting quote that didn’t even rise to the level of tepid trash talk.
I don’t care. What I do care about is this: he got the wrong team.
Smith-Schuster should’ve said “the Steelers is the Steelers.” Because it’s not the team in Cleveland that’s stuck in a perpetual rut of failing self-parody anymore.
Now it’s the one in Pittsburgh.
After Sunday night, it’s abundantly clear to me that the Browns are no longer the Browns. They just won a playoff game. They haven’t done that since 1994. So by that fact alone, Smith-Schuster was wrong.
Not to mention they did so at Heinz Field, where they haven’t won since 2003. They did so by scoring 48 points. And they did so without much of their coaching staff and many key players.
Yet they came to Pittsburgh and “clapped” the Steelers. Am I using that phrase right, Chase Claypool?
That’s 180 degrees opposite of what we have known the Browns to be since they came back into the NFL in 1999.
Meanwhile, the Steelers continue to be what they’ve been for much of the last 10 years of the Mike Tomlin era. They talk too much and they don’t win enough.
They never stink, but they rarely win playoff games. That’s something they’ve failed to do in eight of the last 10 years.
They lose to lesser opponents. They fail at home in the postseason.
With a Hall of Fame quarterback, by the way. And that’s not to absolve Ben Roethlisberger by way of tacitly blaming the coach and the rest of the team. I’m also pointing out that Roethlisberger hasn’t done very well in a lot of those playoff games himself.
They rocket up the standings through Thanksgiving, then they collapse in December and January. They raise expectations, then they fail to reach them.
The quarterback is descending and makes too many turnovers.
The defense is soft unless it’s getting takeaways or sacking the quarterback. It leads the league in sacks every year, then the postseason rolls around, and it can’t get the opposing passer to the ground.
That’s who they are. And they’ve been this way much longer than anyone cares to admit.
“The Steelers is the Steelers.”
They’ve been this way since Tim Tebow hit Demaryius Thomas in that 2011-12 playoff game in Denver.
Is this all head coach Mike Tomlin’s fault? No. But I know that for about a decade he hasn’t been able to fix it.
Is it time to replace the quarterback? Yup. But I don’t see a clear succession plan. Do you?
In all likelihood, this is going to get worse before it gets better. That’s my read. I know many Steelers loyalists will reply by saying, “They were 12-4! The foundation is strong! The bones of the house are good.”
OK. But if you lose five of six (including the playoffs) to close out the season, maybe you’ve got mold. And maybe it’s eroding the house from the inside.
You know what? Maybe I’m like JuJu. Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Here’s a worse realization I just had while writing. It’s not “the Steelers is the Steelers.”
‘Cuz this … this ain’t the Steelers.
The truest thing to say is “the Steelers is the Browns.”
And, unfortunately, I think it might stay that way for a while.
