In the Week 4 game against the Cleveland Browns, the Pittsburgh Steelers came pretty close to winning. But alas! They had to endure a 27-24 defeat as Andre Szmyt made a 56-yard field goal.
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The loss pushed the head coach, Mike McCarthy, to scrutinize the gameplay. The Steelers recorded eight penalties and lost 50 yards to them. Of course, it’s still lower than the Browns’ 14 penalties for 88 yards. But things could have turned into a victory had the Steelers refrained from making foul plays. And that prompted the coach to make a desperate call “to clean our own house.”
Cleaning the house would normally mean a complete overhaul of the team. But the defensive lineman, Cam Heyward, believes otherwise: “I think there’s two ways you can look at cleaning the house,” Heyward said on his appearance on the Rich Eisen Show.
“Clean house can mean we got to fire everybody. We got to get everybody out of position. I don’t think he was referring to that. I think he was referring to we have a lot of incidences where we play good teams, but we have a lot of self-inflicted wounds, whether it’s penalties, missed tackles, stuff like that can be changed on our side of the ball or our side of the game.
“I hope coach McCarthy was referring to that. Today was a good step in that right direction where we were just focusing on what we did the first four weeks. We had some extra time off. So now, we can just lock back in and really put ourselves in a better position.”
This clarification from Heyward came after his head coach, McCarthy, confirmed issues in the locker room.
“You have to play your best football each and every week to win this in this league,” McCarthy said in the press conference. “You definitely play better than your opponent. So, that’s really part of why we’re going about tomorrow the way we’re going about it, because we need to clean our own house. Our house is not clean right now. I get it. It’s Week 5. So, you’re hard-pressed to find a team or two that feels really good about where they are right now.”
However, the internet got McCarthy’s “clean house” comment completely wrong, which is why veteran defensive tackle tried to defend his coach.
Heyward further talked about the “critical penalties” in the Week 4 game. He claimed that the “tackling was atrocious,” and the team needs to clean that slate. He also decided to shine some light on the confrontation between McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers, and the incident when T.J. Watt shouted at Patrick Graham over the headset.
According to Heyward, people have a tendency to make a big deal out of such things. He believed that the incidents were more animated in the public narratives.
Nevertheless, the Steelers need to take a step back and observe their plays. They need to clean up their mistakes, and Heyward agreed with it.
“We were up 7-0. We felt like we were in a good spot,” Heyward noted when Rich Eisen asked him if the clean-up was important, mostly because the Steelers lost at Cleveland for the fifth consecutive time. “But we really had penalties and missed tackles and a lot of things. And that’s just unacceptable to win division games. If it was Baltimore or Cincinnati, you’d feel the exact same way.”
The Steelers don’t need a drastic roster overhaul. All they need is basic execution of plays free from mistakes. By urging his teammates to clean up their self-inflicted penalties and sloppy tackling, Heyward asked for the accountability needed to turn the Steelers’ season around.