The Pittsburgh Steelers Machine Has a Cog Missing

What on earth is happening with the Steelers right now? Ben Roethlisberger is playing MVP-caliber quarterback, the Steelers' multi-dimensional backfield is blowing everyone's doors off, and Kevin Colbert apparently found the legendary Fountain of Wide Receivers in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.

Yet a funny thing keeps happening to this unstoppable winning machine: They keep losing to mediocre teams.

The Steelers flew down to miserable Miami, where the newly christened Hard Rock Stadium has seen plenty of Easy Listening football. There, a Dolphins squad that needed overtime to beat the Cleveland Browns—and tally their only win so far this season—skunked the Steelers, 30-15.

The 34-3 shocker Pittsburgh suffered in Week 3 felt like an ignorable outlier, a perfect storm of one-off foibles and failures: An in-state rivalry game featuring a little-seen rookie quarterback executing a picture-perfect Philadelphia Eagles gameplan that exploited a mismatch of scatback Darren Sproles on beefy linebacker Ryan Shazier. Roethlisberger was sacked four times and picked off once by a new-look Eagles defense. Wendell Smallwood scored a touchdown, and I don't know if he's even a real guy.

This time around in Miami, the failures felt real.

Roethlisberger was picked off twice by a defense that had only one interception all year—tied for last in the NFL. He was sacked twice, and temporarily knocked out of the game by a pass rush that ranked 18th in sacks. The Steelers' ground attack was nonexistent against the NFL's worst rushing defense; Darrius Heyward-Bey's gimmicky 60-yard scamper on a jet sweep nearly matched the rest of the team's rushing total (68 yards):

FACT: @theDHB85 is WAAAAAAYY faster than anyone you've got on D. 60. Yard. TD.
See ya #PITvsMIA https://t.co/dv3PTucAak
— NFL (@NFL) October 16, 2016

It was just as bad on the other side of the ball.

The Steelers defense had allowed just 77 rushing yards per game over their first five games. But Dolphins tailback Jay Ajayi rambled for 204 yards on just 25 attempts. Beleaguered quarterback Ryan Tannehill posted his highest-rated game of the season (97.4). This is the scariest thing about these two losses: It's not just one thing, it's everything.

Roethlisberger gutted out the rest of the game, but told NFL Network's Aditi Kinkhabwala his knee "obviously hurts" and will be getting an MRI:

Ben Roethlisberger says he's getting an MRI on the left knee. His right knee is black and blue. Said, "It obviously hurts." #steelers
— Aditi Kinkhabwala (@AKinkhabwala) October 16, 2016

Of course, the season's far from over. The Steelers are 4-2, and still one game clear of the rest of the AFC North. But they face the New England Patriots next week, and could easily go into their bye week 4-3 (and definitively not among the AFC's best).

Until this afternoon, the Steelers seemed to be an offensive Doomsday Machine chewing up the rest of the league. But there's clearly something wrong under the hood—and if Roethlisberger's gone for any length of time, the machine could stall entirely.