Steelers, Justin Fields still plagued by slow offensive starts

INDIANAPOLIS — As Justin Fields took the first snap from rookie center Zach Frazier on Sunday, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback stumbled, tripping over Frazier’s feet and falling to the turf.

He quickly flipped the ball to running back Najee Harris, but the Indianapolis Colts defense swallowed him up and the play lost 3 yards.

The rest of the first half didn’t go much better for the Steelers offense in the 27-24 loss, their first of the season. Other lowlights included a failed fourth-down conversion on the second drive and a George Pickens fumble near the goal line in the second quarter that wiped away the team’s most promising drive of the half.

By halftime, the Steelers trailed the Colts, who lost quarterback Anthony Richardson in the first quarter, 17-3, continuing a frustrating and troubling trend of slow starts.

Though they started off 3-0, playing from behind with a late-arriving offense was never a sustainable formula for the Steelers, and Sunday that became all the more obvious. To Fields, the key to correcting the early disjointed play is also obvious.

“It’s not a pregame routine,” Fields said. “It’s not doing something special or drinking a different color Gatorade. It is none of that. It’s just coming out first play, coming out focused, ready to go.

“And we didn’t do that at the start. We got going as time went along, but it is not mystical. It is performance at the end of the day, and we didn’t come out with the right intent.”

The offense bounced back with three second-half touchdowns — matching the team’s total touchdowns for the first three weeks — but unlike the earlier performances, the Steelers couldn’t completely dig out of their first-half hole and leave with a win.

“I do like how the offense fought back, and we knew we were shooting ourselves in the foot, so it’s kind of the same story,” Fields said. “So we need to just work on that and work on not hurting ourselves and get to a faster start and not warm up to things and come out the gate hot.”

This was supposed to be the week the Steelers fixed their slow starts. They emphasized it in practice, preached it from podiums and in locker room scrums.

And yet, when Sunday came, the same problem plagued the Steelers for a fourth week in a row.

The offense couldn’t sustain drives. There were self-inflicted wounds, this time in the form of the costly red zone fumble. And the run game was completely absent outside of one drive by Cordarrelle Patterson, who exited with an ankle injury in the second quarter.

“I don’t know,” Harris said when asked what’s causing the slow starts. “It’s just that we just got to execute on our behalf. They’re going to come out there on certain defenses to stop the run. We know that we just got to execute it. Some teams play different structures on stopping it. Some guys have a free hat on certain schemes and stuff like that. We got to see that and take advantage of it. And second half we kind of did better at that.”

The Steelers have trailed at halftime in three of their first four games, but the offensive starts have been especially slow in the past two games. The Steelers averaged five points in the first half the past two games along with 5.1 yards per play. They also converted only 33% of third downs. But in the second halves of those games, the Steelers averaged 17 points, 6.1 yards per play and converted 60% of third downs, per ESPN Research.

“This is the greatest team sport there is,” Fields said. “So if we get all 11 guys on the offensive side doing their job, then we won’t be in the position we were in, especially when they come out in a hot start. We got to be able to respond in that manner. We’ve got to be better on the offensive side of the ball early, for sure.”

At the same time, the defense has also been slow to warm up to the action, getting outscored 37-29 in first halves this season. Sunday’s loss was an especially clumsy start when Richardson hit Michael Pittman Jr. for a 32-yard gain on the first play of the game. From there, the Steelers defense continued to reel, allowing back-to-back touchdown drives to open a game for the first time since a Week 8 loss to the Eagles in 2022. The passing defense also allowed six plays of at least 15 yards, four in the first half. In the first three weeks, the Steelers had allowed just 12 such plays.

“That was one of our goals to minimize the chunk plays, and we went out there and we just weren’t capitalizing — whether we were being in position, we weren’t making a play on the ball,” safety DeShon Elliott said. “We should take practice and bring it to the game. We need to work a little bit [harder] at practice in my opinion, but we’ll be all right.”

Unlike the first three weeks, though, the vaunted Steelers defense was unable to slow the Colts in the second half and allowed them to convert 53% of their third downs, nearly double the Steelers’ allowed season average. So despite a flawed, yet electric second-half performance by Fields with his three touchdowns, the Steelers couldn’t complete the comeback. But for this team to find more success this season, they have to find ways to avoid needing comeback situations.

“The real tangible reasons why we lost this game, man, it’s on us,” coach Mike Tomlin said. “We were sloppy in a lot of ways. You just don’t win football games versus motivated groups in their venue playing the way that we played today in certain instances.”