NFL Week 7 Thursday

STEELERS @ BENGALS - 8:15 PM

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The Pittsburgh Steelers have officially won 3 games in a row and with Baltimore in purgatory, they're officially in the driver seat of the AFC North.

We've got quite the matchup here. This is only the 4th time since 1950 that we've seen an NFL game with two QBs 40+ years old.

Tomlin spoke on the Flacco trade which is kinda funny.

Now on paper, we know this looks ugly for the Bengals... especially on the defensive side of the ball. Incredibly enough, Cincinnati is not the worst defense in the NFL. In terms of efficiency, the Cowboys, Dolphins and Ravens have all been worse defensively than the Bengals so far this year. Regardless, we know this is not a good defense.

I gotta say, I don't love this Steelers offense though. The offensive line isn't generating a ton of push. Outside of the overseas Minnesota game, Pittsburgh hasn't been able to get much of a run game going.

Look at the advanced metrics for the Steelers offensive line. They're pretty terrible. The only positive number on here is pressure rate allowed, and that's only because Aaron Rodgers gets the ball out in two seconds. The Bengals defensive line might actually win these battles.

I think we might be over-valuing the Steelers offense a bit right now. They just had back to back games against good defenses... but they were in very favorable spots in both of em. Minnesota was missing the entire offensive line in that game. Cleveland was just coming back from an overseas trip against a rested Steelers team coming off a bye week. Back to back games, we've seen the Steelers offense play in a game where the ball was gifted right back to them immediately. In the previous two games, when we saw the offense on the sidelines a bit more, they didn't look good.

Now let's be clear... this is the Cincinnati Bengals defense. And they might even be missing Trey Hendrickson again. He hasn't practiced this week. I wanna be clear... by no means am I saying Cincinnati's defense is gonna go out there and make a ton of stops. I'm just saying we've seen the Steelers offense struggle when they're not put in amazing situations.

So that brings the question, will Cincinnati move the ball in this game? Based on the year-long numbers, it wouldn't seem like it.

But one thing we have to point out about Pittsburgh's defense... they were just put into the two most favorable spots ever. Playing Minnesota with Carson Wentz at QB missing their entire offensive line. Then they have a bye week... two weeks to prepare for Dillon Gabriel who's directly flying home from Europe. Let's not forget that this Pittsburgh defense looked terrible in the 3 games before that.

Now we do need to point out that Pittsburgh was dealing with some injuries earlier in the season. Joey Porter missed time... Alex Highsmith missed time. They're both back now. They may be missing Deshon Elliott in this game though.

And when it comes to Cincinnati's offense. Obviously, we've got Joe Flacco at QB now and it did look slightly better. But can we at least admit that this offense has been through the absolute gauntlet? Look at these teams last 4 games!

In fact, if you take a step back and look at the Bengals schedule so far this year, can't you make the point that they've basically played a top 10 defense every single week? The only team they've played that probably isn't a top 10 defense is Jacksonville. A) Jags defense has actually been respectable this year and B) They won that game and scored 31 points!

I'm on Cincinnati at +6.