Steelers OC Randy Fichtner needs to put on his big boy pants and shoulder the blame for crumbling offense
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, it broke officially around Week 12, and there’s no fix in sight.
For the second week in a row, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger takes all of the blame for the team’s offensive struggles. And, like their offense, it’s getting predictable.
“Offensively, we are not very good,” said Roethlisberger in a postgame press conference. “Right now, we are not playing good football, and that starts with me. We all need to look in the mirror, and, like I said, it starts with me.”
There’s no question that Roethlisberger is part of the problem, but the solution starts with the man charged with calling those plays. It’s offensive coordinator Randy Fichtner’s job to … coordinate the offense.
The quarterback’s job is to execute that offense — a tall task when what was once innovative is now unimaginative and lifeless.
A team is only as good as its ability to adapt. The Steelers aren’t adapting, so what does that make them? The loss to the Washington Football Team should’ve been a wake-up call to dig into the playbook and come up with a different approach. That never happened.
Roethlisberger is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, and for the first 11 weeks of the season, he was executing well an offensive scheme that was the opposite of everything he’d known for 16 seasons.
But it’s not working anymore and hasn’t been since Week 12. It’s beyond time for Fichtner to draw up something new that melds with Big Ben’s capabilities and that the offense can win with. If he can’t, Pittsburgh won’t see round two of the playoffs.
