Pittsburgh Steelers team president Art Rooney II made clear early in his Wednesday interview with several members of the local media that the team’s poor kicking game played a big part in them missing the playoffs this season.
“If I had to point to a couple of things that I think were problems that may have cost us that opportunity (to be in the playoffs), No. 1 was a lack of even an average kicking game,”Rooney said, according to steelers.com.” For somewhat inexplicable reasons our kicker went from one of the best in the league to one of the worse in the league, and so games that we won close last year, we didn’t win close this year.