I only noticed this because I was at a bar where they had all the morning games on at once. But for some reason, the first quarter and a half of the Steelers game went so quickly compared to the other games that we were ahead of most of them by several minutes of clock time. I looked up midway through the second quarter, and most of the other games were either just starting the second quarter or still finishing up the first. The 49ers-Lions game, which was the slowest of the bunch, we were literally almost a full quarter ahead of.
So of course, by the time we went up 17-0, I'm thinking, "Aww, crap, now they're going to slow the game down for TV," which is exactly what happened. Pretty much for the duration of the game, it was more commercial breaks, longer timeouts, an extra minute or two wasted on every change of possession, to the point where the action was that kind of jerky, stilted stop-and-go stuff that gives you a headache to watch. Five or six plays at a time, then 5 minutes of TV timeout to break it up.
Once that started, we lost any momentum or rhythm that we had going. It didn't help Jacksonville either, really; neither team could move the ball once the game got bogged down in that shit, and if it wasn't for a stroke of luck in the form of that roughing the kicker penalty, I'm pretty sure there would've been zero defining plays in the whole second half.
Anyway ... that to me was really the night-and-day moment when things started to go sour. I didn't really notice anything different in the way we were playing, except that once the slowdown started, we were completely out of sync in the passing game. The same thing happens sometimes in those games where the other team hold on to the ball for 10 minutes in a row. So I'm not really too worried about the offense in general, the defense in general, our inability to put away a crappy team, whatever. On to the next game.
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Originally Posted by shutdown
