Is Bruce Arians Telling the Truth?

As we get ready for the 2009 season, nearly everyone but the Steelers coaching staff sees the offensive line as the weakest link in the team's bid to repeat as Super Bowl champs. In fact, ESPN.com's AFC North blogger James Walker made that case again this week.

But Frank Tursic over at Steel City Insider has gone further to try to figure out whether offensive coordinator Bruce Arians was being completely straightforward when he said that only 19 of the 49 sacks the Steelers gave up last year were the fault of the offensive line.As the sources for his information, Tursic uses the breakdowns on the Steelers o-line written here at Fanhouse plus Stats Inc.'s sack stats. In Tursic's view, Arians was saying that on only 19 of the Steelers sacks was an offensive lineman physically beaten--my stats showed 20 of the sacks came when a lineman was physically beaten which seems to be very comparable. There were another nine sacks by my stats where a mental breakdown by an offensive lineman led to a sack.

But here it's worth making a disclaimer that explains why Arians could be truthful. By watching the offensive line closely there is a lot to be learned, but there's also a lot we can't know as fans/bloggers.

A lot of what is happening is very apparent: watching Max Starks get abused by Raiders defensive end Derrick Burgess back in 2006 was easy for anyone to figure out. Burgess lined up on Stark's outside shoulder and beat him to the corner over and over for five sacks. Eventually the Steelers gave Starks help from a tight end or a running back on almost every passing play in the second half. Late that season, the Steelers benched Starks, so they were seeing what we the fans were seeing.

It was the same in 2007 when watching Jets nose tackle DeWayne Robertson destroy Steelers center Sean Mahan. Even without knowing the exact play call, it's easy to tell when Robertson picked Mahan up and threw him into the backfield that Mahan was being dominated--there is no play call that asks the center to act like he's been tossed around like a bale of hay. It was something written about here and elsewhere by blogs at the time. We called it as we saw it--Mahan was one of the worst lineman the Steelers had started in years, and he was a gaping hole in a bad line. It was something that the Steelers' coaching staff publicly disagreed with, but it's worth noting that when the season was over, Pittsburgh went out and signed Justin Hartwig to replace him, then dumped Mahan to Tampa Bay for a seventh-round pick. Mahan did not start a game last year.

But there are other times that it's not nearly so clear. When the Eagles destroyed the Steelers' blocking scheme in 2008, no one player was getting physically beaten. Instead a completely lost offense couldn't figure out how to block the Eagles' blitzes from everywhere. When that's the case, it's much harder to figure out who's at fault.

If a cornerback comes on a corner blitz, usually it's up to the wide receiver and the quarterback to see it and sight adjust to have the receiver run a quick slant or stop to the spot vacated by the blitzing corner. So if the receiver doesn't cut off his route, the quarterback may look his way, find no one to throw to and end up eating the ball for a sack. But without knowing the play call and without the coaches tape that shows the receiver's route, we, the fans, can't usually know that's what happened. So when counting sacks, I've always used a stopwatch and given Roethlisberger a sliding scale depending on how many blockers he has and how many blitzers he is facing. If the Steelers call max protect against a four-man rush, Roethlisberger should get at least three to three and a half seconds to throw against the flooded zones he'll be facing. If Pittsburgh is trying to send five receivers out against a seven-man blitz, Roethlisberger should expect to have significantly less time to throw. It's not perfect, but it's a way to try to account for the quarterback's role in taking sacks.

So we do the best we can to guesstimate without knowing for sure who is at fault. If a blitzer comes up the middle, the logical assumption is that an offensive lineman messed up--usually the rules are to block inside out, where linemen block the inside rusher instead of the outside rusher if they have two options. But sometimes running backs are involved in blitz pickups in those situations and it's hard to know who screwed up.

In that case, it's a mental breakdown and we try to guess who was at fault. It seems illogical to think that in the case of the nine sacks I assigned to mental breakdowns of the offensive line that backs, Roethlisberger or receivers running wrong routes were responsible for all of them. But without having reason to believe that Arians is simply lying (although as shown in the case of Mahan, the Steelers coaches will stretch the truth), I'm willing to think that some of the sacks I attributed to the line were actually others' responsibility.

But that in no way means the Steelers' offensive line isn't a weak link on this team--for every two sacks that Roethlisberger may have cost the Steelers by his tendency to hold onto the ball, it's fair to argue he saved them one sack because of his scrambling ability and his knack for shrugging off tacklers (I'd argue it's closer to one-for-one). And the Steelers' biggest problem last year was its struggles in the running game as the offensive line simply couldn't knock good defenses back, especially in goal line situations. If the Steelers can't fix that in 2009, it will make the title defense a whole lot tougher.