Bucs get schooled by Pittsburgh for first loss of season Roy Cummings, The Tampa Tribune, published 27 September 2010 Raheem Morris and Mike Tomlin can go back to being just good friends now. Perhaps it's best that way. Their first matchup as NFL head coaches didn't go so well. Not for Morris, anyway. Tomlin, who mentored Morris when both were Buccaneers assistants a few years back, schooled his buddy yet again Sunday as the Pittsburgh Steelers pushed the Bucs around during a 38-13 victory before a crowd of 57,616 at Raymond James Stadium. The loss was the first of the year for the Bucs, who still have a share of the NFC South lead but fell to 2-1 and were awoken suddenly from a dreamy start to the season that now seems like it was just that - a dream. A Bucs defense that allowed just 21 points combined the first two games gave up 28 before halftime Sunday. An offense that found the end zone four times in two games found the goal line virtually impenetrable. "We played a heavyweight, and they were more physical than us, more aggressive than us and more opportunistic than us,'' Morris said. "That's not the type of game you want to have against a team like that.'' Morris's comments, and the game itself, conjured memories of the physical beatings the Jets and Giants handed the Bucs a year ago, but few in Tampa Bay's locker room saw a comparison. "No one got manhandled today,'' said Bucs left tackle Donald Penn, part of an offensive line that gave up four sacks, one more than it surrendered the first two games combined. "They won the point battle today, that's it.'' "They didn't really dominate us,'' Bucs quarterback Josh Freeman said. "The scoreboard may show that, but at the same time, I feel like our team's mentality walking away was, 'We can play with those guys.' " The Bucs did play at the Steelers level for a while, intercepting fill-in quarterback Charlie Batch on the second play of the game. All the Bucs mustered from that takeaway, though, was a field goal. That wasn't enough to shake the Steelers, and certainly wasn't enough to shake the 35-year-old Batch, who came back two series later and burned rookie safety Cody Grimm on a 46-yard touchdown pass to Mike Wallace. That score sparked a Steelers offensive rally in which they scored touchdowns on four consecutive possessions, including one in which cornerback Aqib Talib tipped a ball into Wallace's hands in the end zone. "We didn't take advantage of our opportunities today,'' Geno Hayes said. "We dropped two picks, we gave up some long plays to them and we didn't stop 'em when they got to the goal line.'' They really didn't stop them anywhere. The Steelers averaged 7.9 yards per offensive play, which is nearly double what the Bucs allowed in their first two games. The Steelers also ran for a whopping 6.3 yards per rush. Rashard Mendenhall accounted for 143 of those Steelers rushing yards, 103 coming in the second half. The Bucs' best offensive series, meanwhile, was directed by backup quarterback Josh Johnson against the Steelers' backups. "They took us out of our game mentality,'' Morris said. "You want to get those guys into situations where they have to stop the run and beat you with the pass instead of running Mendenhall all day. But what happened was they were able to get the lead, so the mentality of the game changed. They kind of made us one-dimensional, which is not good when you're playing against a good defense like that.'' Despite their one-dimensional approach, the Bucs moved the ball well at times. Freeman completed 20 of 31 passes for 184 yards and Johnson was 6-for-6 for 67 yards as the Bucs finished with 303 yards of total offense. "(Freeman) played well,'' Morris said of the second-year starting quarterback. "He played smart. He had the one unfortunate tipped ball that ended up as an interception, but other than that he played good enough to win the game.'' The same can probably be said of running back LeGarrette Blount. The rookie out of Oregon gained 26 yards on his first four carries to set the stage for the Bucs' second score, another field goal, and finished with six carries for 27 yards and a touchdown in his NFL debut. "He did some things that I wanted him to do today,'' Morris said, "and it might've been a different outcome if we had been able to get some of those early points and use him the way we'd planned to. But we didn't get that and we lost that game on defense and on field position, and we lost it because we lost the mentality of how we wanted the game to be played. "So, now we're sitting here at 2-1, and, no, I'm not happy with that because I wanted to be 3-0. But nobody had us at 2-1 going into the bye either, so we have to look at the big picture and just try to build on what we have.''