After further review …
Complementary football was on display in all three phases as the Steelers put the Falcons away.
The defense got a stop that preserved a fourth-quarter lead.
The offense used up all but 53 seconds of the 5:27 left in regulation after the Falcons had pulled to within three.
And Pressley Harvin III came up with the type of wedge shot that wins at Augusta National when his punt in the final minute hit between the 1- and 2-yard lines and backed up.
As it turned out, they needed all of the above.
Prior to dialing up the necessary finishing kick, a game the Steelers had dominated in the first half was in danger of slipping away in the second.
Fortunately, the Steelers "collectively did not blink," head coach Mike Tomlin noted.
The Falcons, conversely, did.
And that, too, was a component of Steelers 19, Falcons 16 on Sunday afternoon at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Atlanta had a 10-yard touchdown run nullified by a holding penalty on first-and-goal from the Steelers' 10-yard line midway through the fourth quarter.
And two snaps later the Falcons committed a false start on second-and-goal from the Steelers' 18.
And that sequence, as much as anything else, was how a drive that lasted 16 plays and took 9:21 to compete ended not with seven points and a 20-19 Atlanta advantage but with three points and the Steelers still in possession of the lead at 19-16.
"I'm not going to pretend like it was something that we did," Tomlin acknowledged. "Often times it's not. Same thing happened to us on offense, to be quite honest with you. Some of those drives got stopped by a false start or something that put us behind the chains, and they didn't necessarily stop us, we stopped us.
"Offenses do that, and so I thought that was kind of reflective of what transpired."
As Chuck Noll once noted, "Before you can win a game you have to not lose it."
Atlanta losing this one also included the Falcons going off-script initially.
The Falcons, a running team if ever there was one, threw five passes on their first seven snaps (including a run that was negated by a holding penalty) and attempted four more on their seven-play second possession.
By halftime they had run the ball six times for 28 yards and tried to throw it 16 times (17 if you included Cam Heyward's sack of Marcus Mariota in the second quarter) on the way to a 16-6 deficit.
In the second half Atlanta got back into character and ran it 22 times for 118 yards.
"Every team plays games differently," T.J. Watt offered. "They do one thing all the way leading up to the game and you think they're going to stick to what they do and then all of a sudden, they play us, and it seems to change a little bit.
"You can never really be surprised. At the end of the day, we just have to be able to defend what they give us."
You have to be able to adjust.
You also have to not beat yourself.
The Steelers, at 5-7 and riding the season's first two-game winning streak, appear to have that much figured out.
