They showed up ready for a physical confrontation with a familiar foe. Look no further than a tone-setting 17-play touchdown drive on their opening possession, capped by a touchdown flip forward from Rodgers to Wilson, who came in motion and scored from 12 yards out.<\/p>\n
While that ate up 9:48 of clock, it turned out that getting to the second quarter wasn’t a good thing for the Steelers. That’s where everything went wrong.<\/p>\n
The Browns outscored the Steelers, 21-3, in the final 12:15 of the first half, including back-to-back-to-back touchdown drives before Chris Boswell hit a 31-yard field goal with 8 seconds to go until the break. Jaleel McLaughlin weaved through Steelers defenders for a 28-yard touchdown run that got the Browns on the board, followed by a couple of 2-yard touchdowns, one on a rush by Quinshon Judkins and the other on a pass from Watson to Harold Fannin Jr.<\/p>\n
“Self-inflicted wounds,” Heyward said. “Execution was not high today. We had penalties. But I’m not going to make excuses. They got the job done on their side.”<\/p>\n
Boswell’s field goal made it 21-10 at halftime, with the Steelers getting the ball first on the ensuing kickoff. But all they could muster was repeat three-and-outs until the clock struck Watt.<\/p>\n
T.J. Watt stripped Watson on a read-option play and recovered the fumble himself at the 50. With a new set of downs at midfield, the Steelers couldn’t move the ball and instead had to settle for Cameron Johnston’s fourth punt of the night.<\/p>\n
Another Steelers pass-rusher came up huge, though, when Jack Sawyer tipped a Watson pass early in the fourth quarter. Rookie safety Robert Spears-Jennings came up with his first career interception, and a savvy challenge by head coach Mike McCarthy paid off. After Daylen Everette was flagged for pass interference, McCarthy threw the red flag for officials to review whether Sawyer got a finger on the ball. He did, which negated the penalty, and the ruling was overturned.<\/p>\n
The Steelers turned that takeaway into points, on a drive highlighted by a 43-yard hook-up from Rodgers to a diving DK Metcalf. Rodgers threw another dime while on the move to Darnell Washington, who snagged it in the end zone for a 21-yard touchdown catch that made it 21-16 with 10:10 remaining. The Steelers went for 2 to cut it to a one-score game, but could not convert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They showed up ready for a physical confrontation with a familiar foe. Look no further than a tone-setting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[89735,564,563,73,75,74,122649,565,6029],"class_list":["post-298177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-brian-batko-content","tag-featured","tag-non-sponsored","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-pittsburgh-steelers-at-cleveland-browns-2026-reg-4","tag-sights-and-sounds","tag-xtra-points"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}