It was mind numbingly obvious that Sanchez's first read on every pass play seemed to be Santonio Holmes after the field goal. The broadcast mentioned how Holmes, Ike Taylor, and Sanchez worked together in the offseason and Sanchez thought he had an inside track on Taylor, but my God, they just tried to force feed Santonio the ball there. Not throwing to Hill with his size advantage (the first pass was brilliantly defended by Taylor I believe) was stupid. For all the praise Sporano got for his system last week, him and Sanchez deserve a good amount of blame for today. All the Steelers wanted to do since the 2nd quarter was to rush the QB, and block off Sanchez. That sucked to watch, a terrible game plan, looked like Schotty all over again.
I don't think its fair to put the blame on Sanchez. We saw tons of drops today. I would say probably around 7 to 8 drops today, with each drop killing our drives. The fumbled punt return didn't help, and not having Revis didn't help our pass D.
When you look at the stats without watching the game, it makes Mark seem like he was very inaccurate and unproductive. However, usually when Mark is having a bad day and making bad throws he usually is throwing interceptions. Now today the offense had problems all around, but Mark's throws weren't all that bad. Yea there were some passes that could have been thrown better (especially the overthrown pass to Holmes), but as stated numerous times already there were at least 5 drops today. His receivers did not help him at all today and that hit that he took looked straight nasty. He just didn't look the same. I'm going to give Mark the benefit of the doubt that he wasn't scared of the Pittsburgh defense (especially after he drove it 90 yards for a touchdown) after the hit, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had a minor concussion. I guess the medical team felt that he was fine, but that hit just didn't seem right to me.
Sanchez has a thing for locking onto a single guy, last year it Keller. The first game of the season was really refreshing with him spreading the ball around. This week he was back to locking onto one guy again. At some point yesterday he's going to stop going to Holmes.
I think part of those drops were really tight passes, that were going to be very tough catches. But I do agree the WRs didn't really help him out too much. But what I would've liked him to do was really stop throwing to Holmes, and trying to find the other WRs since they were matched up on lesser CBs. Maybe he was injured, I wouldn't be surprised. But I think that if he was injured, and with how Tebow looked briefly, they probably would've given him more time in there. I think Holmes demanded the ball and he obliged, or he just locked in on his one WR. I found it appalling that they didn't go to Hill much at all, because he had a great size advantage out there. But it is interesting that, his downslide started after that hit. Today, since the 2nd quarter to me, it was almost always look at Holmes, check down to TE/RB underneath. His progressions seemed to stay on one side of the field, atleast to my untrained eye. He seemed to look right, check down to his right. Look left, check down left. Although with how our defense was playing, he needed to be a star today to even have a shot.
He was locking on to the first read because the Steelers were getting a lot of pressure on us. Not gonna be much time when you can't progress through all of your reads.
I don't mind quick reads or hot routes because of pressure, but he seemed fixated on Holmes as his only hot read, which made the defense focus on Holmes a lot more. When the game started, their defense was playing back from Holmes and trying to account for all the WRs. After the first quarter, Taylor went into man bump coverage, giving Holmes no space at all, yet we didn't try to look away.
