At the risk of being dramatic, the Steelers’ Week 9 game against the Ravens is the single-most important event in the history of the world.
Ok, it’s not quite that — it might not even be the most important Steelers vs. Ravens regular season game ever — but what is for sure is both teams need to win this game if they want to have any chance at the postseason.
At stake is the lead in the AFC North at the midway point of the season. Bragging rights. All that kind of stuff. More importantly, at stake is the pride of two franchises that have fallen off considerably from where they were in their days of semi-dominance at the start of the decade. They both won AFC championships. The Ravens won a Super Bowl.
Since then, injuries and failed expectations fill the gaps while national pundits continue to tout this as the best rivalry in football. The Ravens have won eight of their last 23 games. Two of those eight wins came against the Steelers, a team that has managed to win more than four of its first eight games once in its last three seasons.
The history has always been defined in the games played late in the season. Except for last season, when an allegedly rested and poised Steelers team went to M&T Bank Stadium to barely compete with a depleted Ravens’ squad. Baltimore won 20-17 (it felt way worse than that), forcing the Steelers to seek assistance to qualify for the postseason.
It wasn’t much better before that, either.
The Steelers limped into a 2014 wild-card playoff game against the Ravens down team MVP Le’Veon Bell. Baltimore’s 30-17 win only proved the Steelers should have doubled Bell’s award, as a slogging, run-less offense paced by the triumvirate of Ben Tate, Dri Archer and Josh Harris were less than effective (to put it mildly) in one of the least memorable Steelers’ playoff games ever.
In 2013, one year after Joe Flacco led the Ravens to the franchise’s second Super Bowl title, the Steelers fell apart early and the Ravens collapsed late. Both teams missed the postseason, the first time that had happened in over a decade.
The arrow should be pointed up for the Steelers, though. Injuries affect every team, but critical ones, like the hamstring injury sustained by Cam Heyward as well as Ryan Shazier’s most recent malady, decimated a defense that turned out to be much thinner than anticipated. The Dolphins and Patriots ran around, over and through the Steelers’ defensive front seven in two consecutive losses. An offense that’s supposedly cursed with an overabundance of talent is following a disturbing trend of recent years in which it scores 30-plus points in consecutive weeks only to follow up with back-to-back games with 15 and 16 points, consecutively.
We can fairly blame some of that on Roethlisberger’s injury, one it seems, leading into the game, he’s going to gut his way through against a pair of his greatest tormentors; the Ravens and M&T Bank Stadium.
Overall, Roethlisberger’s worst rating against an opponent he’s played five times or more is 84.5 against the Ravens. His career-long streak of holding a winning record against Baltimore overall will be put to the test if he starts today. At 9-8 overall, the stat masks the fact his Steelers have lost four of five against the Ravens and all of the last three games played in Baltimore.
The Steelers haven’t won in Baltimore since a 23-20 victory in 2012, a game in which Roethlisberger didn’t even play. In fact, you have to go all the way back to 2010 to find a Roethlisberger-led Steelers team defeating the Ravens in Baltimore.
And the Steelers went to the Super Bowl that year, on the speed of a division-round win over the Ravens, but that game was played in Pittsburgh.
So, win in Baltimore and win a Super Bowl? Probably not a cause-and-effect stat, but neither is five consecutive losses on the road to your rival.
That’s why this game is so important if the Steelers want to have any chance of meeting the expectations they have — and should have — this season. It’s a hill they must climb. If this team must prove anything, it’s that they can win big road games, especially ones that come after a bye week and while riding a two-game losing streak.
And most of all, ones against the Ravens.
