CLEVELAND _ If you had Anthony Chickillo scoring the first Steelers touchdown of 2017, run straight to the nearest lottery line.
You can run there with scissors, in fact, and do it blindfolded, because that's where your luck quotient is riding right now, riding high right along with that of the Steelers.
On a sun-swept afternoon on the shores of almost picturesque Lake Erie _ almost _ the Steelers committed 13 penalties, punted six times, turned the ball over, and managed exactly one first down on the ground in 60 minutes, all of which left them just fortunate enough to beat the Browns.
Because Browns gotta Brown.
To start the scoring Sunday, Chickillo, the outside linebacker who was outside the starting lineup until Bud Dupree was scratched on the weekend, flopped on a blocked punt in the Cleveland end zone before the din of the F16's flyover had fully faded. About equally as likely, Jesse James, whose current aptitude as the starting tight end was so impressive the Steelers swung a trade for Vance McDonald just weeks ago, added two more touchdowns as Mike Tomlin's team got out of town with a 21-18 victory that was every bit as shaggy as it looked.
They say the Steelers have the easiest road schedule in the NFL this year in terms of distance, a mere 6,694 combined miles, but right now it's a queasy easy.
"High school," Chickillo said helpfully on the matter of when he last scored a for-real touchdown. "I caught a pass."
As a tight end?
"No," he said. "I was a wide receiver."
But if there were 100 unpredictable ways in which the Steelers forced a typical Cleveland unraveling of still another new Cleveland quarterback, one was an intensely familiar groove, specifically the relentless pass rush that seems to love this Northeast Ohio lawn like no other.
"We did what we do," said Tomlin, now 42-19 against divisional foes at the start of his 11th season. "We covered some. We pressured some. We tried to search for that mix and balance and tried to put guys in a position to win. Largely, I thought they did that."
The Steelers had eight sacks in a game at FirstEnergy Stadium Nov. 20, or 24 percent of their season total. Sunday they had seven more. Fifteen sacks in two games by nine different players. Chickillo and No. 1 draft choice T.J. Watt led the way with two each. Cameron Heyward had one, Javon Hargrave had one, and cornerback Joe Haden, acquired from the Browns at the end of August, knew exactly what to do when you come out of the opposite locker room in this building _ sack the quarterback.
"There were a lot of plays left on the field," said Watt after his first game as a pro brought the matchup assignment of future Hall-of-Fame Cleveland tackle Joe Thomas. "We gotta go back and get things corrected. It's a great start in terms of sacks, but there were sacks we could have made and didn't."
The biggest sack they got came early in the third quarter with the Browns at the Steelers 9 and in great position to score a tying touchdown. But Watt swooped in from Thomas' left and nailed DeShone Kizer for a crippling minus 9, and after the 21-year-old Kizer couldn't convert the resultant third-and-16, Cleveland settled for a field goal.
Put another way, Watt's second sack was essentially a four-point play in a game the Steelers won by three.
It also resulted in a sack dance that looked like something from the silent film era, a series of short, jerky moves that were far more comic than rhythmic. I had to wonder if we might see it again.
"Naw," Watt laughed. "There are a lot of 'em; that's just the first one that came to mind."
Good.
Watt's game looked spectacular but wasn't pristine. He drew one of the 13 penalties for a late hit, but more than compensated with a leaping interception that he returned 17 yards.
"That was all mine," he said. "We practice catching those and that was mine to get. Just trying to make a play, doesn't matter if it's in the pass game or the run game."
Thus Watt verily tortured Kizer, one of the few players on the field younger than he.
The second-round pick out of Notre Dame, and the 27th different starting quarterback for this bedeviled franchise since 1999, debuted with a 20-for-30 passing performance that included a touchdown and a pretty decent passer rating of 85.7. Had he known he'd be the Browns' leading rusher with 17 yards on five carries, he could have told you what an unwonderful day this would be.
"Back in college I was running a power run game from the quarterback position, so I'm used to taking a couple hits," Kizer said in Sunday's bruise-filled aftermath. "But at this level it's my job to make sure that I'm out there for my teammates, and in order to do so, you've got to try to limit as many hits as possible."
Good luck with that, you poor man. Don't run with scissors. Ever.
