FanHouse Whotoblamesteelers

As they try to explain away last year's 47 regular season sacks (and it was 53 if you count the playoff game), you're going to hear a lot over the next weeks about how Ben Roethlisberger is working on getting rid of the ball quicker.

But if you listen to the Steelers offensive line coach, it's already apparent that Roethlisberger isn't the big problem.

Offensive line coach Larry Zierlein told several reporters that he estimates that the offensive line was responsible for 29 or 30 of the Steelers regular season sacks last season. He blames the running backs for another six sacks, tight ends for five and Roethlisberger was responsible for the rest--which comes up to six or seven sacks.

I went back this offseason and rewatched every sack of the 2008 season. By my count, I said that Roethlisberger could have been blamed for 10 sacks (counting the postseason) if you were being hard on Roethlisberger, so the numbers are pretty similar--obviously Zierlein is much more in the know and has much better film to grade the line than I do, so I'm glad to see the numbers pretty well match up.

This post is part of a series of posts that try to figure out who's to blame for the Steelers sack problems. The first story in the series listed how many sacks each lineman was responsible for. Now we're looking at how much of the blame can be put on quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Click here for all the posts in the series. To get this data, I went back and rewatched all 53 sacks from the Steelers' 2007 season including the playoff game, logging the type of rush, the time it took for the defender to get to Roethlisberger, who was responsible and any mitigating factors.

If Sean Mahan has gotten the majority of the blame for the Steelers' sack problems from Steelers fans and media members, Ben Roethlisberger hasn't been far behind. The logic is that the Steelers' guarterback holds onto the ball so long that he turns incomplete passes into sacks.

It's hard to argue the point. We all have seen numerous plays where Roethlisberger has slipped out of a blitzing linebacker's grasp, scrambled to the outside and then found Hines Ward or others downfield. But we've also seen plays where he spotted a blitzing cornerback, figured he could break the tackle, and went down on the initial hit. There are plays where Roethlisberger hangs on to the ball, gets hit and taken down when a quarterback who's less of a gambler would have simply thrown the ball into the stands.

As the Steelers go through the offseason, the biggest concern of every Steelers fan in the country is the offensive line. Short of Ben Roethlisberger riding helmet-less on a motorcycle again, there's nothing that worries Steelers fans more than the idea of the Steelers offensive line getting blown off the ball again in 2008.

To get a better understanding of what went wrong in 2007, when Roethlisberger was sacked 53 times in 17 games, I went back and rewatched each and every sack of the 2007 season. It wasn't particularly fun, but it was pretty informative. We'll end up breaking down the sacks in countless different ways, but to start out this series, it's worth just spelling out who gave up the sacks.

But before we get to who's to blame, it's worth mentioning how the blame was metered out. Determining the man at fault for a sack is somewhat of an art more than a science. For each sack, I rewatched the play several times to note the amount of pass rushers, the type of pass rush (straight four-man rush vs. a safety blitz for example), where the pressure came from, and how long it took before Roethlisberger was hit initially. If one man was beaten initially to come in and hit or pressure Roethlisberger but another defender finished off the sack, I generally tried to credit the sack to the first man beaten, unless the initial rush had nothing to do with the sack (for example if an outside blitzer forced Roethlisberger to step up in the pocket, but he did and the rusher flew on by, but the center was then beaten for a sack, blame the center). And if two rushers shared a sack, or if a rusher flew between two uncovered offensive linemen, 1/2 sacks were awarded. If you have more questions about how I credited sacks, feel free to comment and I'll give more details.

So without further delay, here's the chart of who gave up the Steelers 2007 sacks.