The Pittsburgh Steelers didn’t have much time to recover from their Week 8 loss at home to the Jacksonville Jaguars. They were back at it on Thursday Night Football to kick off Week 9, hosting the Tennessee Titans.

Pittsburgh was able to keep pace in the tight AFC North race, defeating Tennessee 20-16. But, it was far from the prettiest game the Steelers have ever played, as head coach Mike Tomlin did not mince words when talking about his team’s performance in a post-game press conference.

The Steelers did everything in their power to lose the game, committing a season-high 10 penalties for 80 yards. The turnovers were the first thing that Tomlin mentioned in his presser, as he was far from thrilled with how his team performed despite the victory.

“Really excited about the win. [But] obviously, it could have been cleaner,” Tomlin told reporters. “First and foremost from a penalty perspective, part of being a tough team to beat first is not kicking your own butt, and we’ve kind of been doing that some. We’ve got to own that.

“We will. We’ll review it, we’ll learn from it, we’ll look at it.”

Being that undisciplined was out of the norm for the Steelers. They entered Week 9 as the third-least penalized team in the NFL with only 36 accepted penalties against them in seven games. 

Committing that many, especially at home, was far from ideal. Half of the 10 came in the first quarter of the game, with four being called against the defense. They routinely kept Titans drives alive with untimely penalties, making the game much tougher on themselves than it had to be.

How are the Steelers going to clean up the penalty issues? Tomlin has a plan in place to curtail them during the upcoming practice sessions.

“We’ll bring some officials into our practice setting in an effort to be cleaner because that was catastrophic really in a lot of instances to our efforts tonight,” said Tomlin. (H/T Heavy)

Given the current makeup of their team, the Steelers cannot afford to give yardage away as they did against the Titans. They are winning games despite an offense that cannot consistently move the ball, putting a lot of pressure on the defense to continually bail them out. Victories will be hard to come by if they are going to commit 10 penalties in games in the future.

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