However, McCarron and several teammates said the game wasn’t decided by the actions of the two defensive players. Burfict was called for a hit to the head on Antonio Brown, and Jones was called for an attempted punch in reaction to a coach on the field.
“I’m not here to throw shade at anyone,” McCarron said when asked about the penalties. “We win together and lose together. It doesn’t matter if someone lost their poise or didn’t — we win together and lose together. We need to have each other’s back through this process. That’s the best way to take the biggest step into next year to becoming the team we can be. If we use this time to point fingers at each other, we’re taking steps back as a team, and we don’t need that.”
Defensive end Carlos Dunlap said people will point fingers at whoever they can find to blame, but it falls on everyone, adding “I wear stripes too.” The Bengals gave up a fourth-down conversion on the play before the penalties, which Dunlap said was normally a stop they make.
Safety George Iloka said, “It never should have come down to that.”
“Them two didn’t lose the game,” he said. “They are who they are, and we wouldn’t even be in the playoffs if it wasn’t for those two this year. Don’t even start with that. All the plays Vontaze made, that put us in the position to be up, all the plays Pac made — I’m not worried about that. That didn’t lose us the game. Obviously, you don’t those things, but that’s not what lost the game. It was a combination of other things.”
Iloka also cited inconsistencies in the officiating, like when Shawn Williams was called for a hit to the head in a collision with Markus Wheaton in the second quarter but no call was made when Antwon Blake clearly launched at Tyler Eifert.
Head coach Marvin Lewis eluded to disappointment in the inconsistencies as well.
“He’s trying to go over and defend the play,” Lewis said of Burfict’s hit on Brown. “There were a lot of plays out there and calls went different ways. They deemed that to be a hit to the head I guess, and others not today.”
Wet conditions made it tough: After McCarron threw an interception that set up the Steelers' first scoring drive, he decided to try a glove on his throwing hand to see if that would help with his grip on the ball in rainy weather.
McCarron kept taking it off and putting it on throughout the remainder of the game. He was wearing it on the 25-yard touchdown pass to A.J. Green, which gave the Bengals a 16-15 lead with 1:50 left.
“The ball was soaking wet,” McCarron said. “(Russell) Bodine was even telling me that he was having trouble with the snaps. I thought they’d at least put a towel over it or something, but there was nothing done. I didn’t know it was done that way, but every time we got the ball it was soaking wet.”
Dalton reaction: Quarterback Andy Dalton said he would have done everything he could to get back for the AFC divisional round if the Bengals had won Saturday, though he still has an upcoming doctor's visit to check up on his injured right thumb.
It was especially difficult for him to watch the Bengals’ season come to an end with him on the sidelines for a fourth straight game in which he was inactive.
“It’s obviously tough for me to just sit on the sideline and not be playing,” Dalton said. “You want to help the team and do what you can for this team, organization, this city, but obviously with the injury I wasn’t able to do that. It’s tough to not be out there helping my team.”
Are the Bengals cursed? Dunlap said it was like "a dream coming true" when the Bengals took their lead, but it quickly turned into a "bad dream."
The disappointment ran through the locker room Saturday night, as the Bengals were hoping to give Cincinnati its first playoff win in 25 years and instead ended up with their seventh straight one-and-done postseason performance.
“We were so close to giving this city what they deserved — to do it against a team like Pittsburgh — and for it not to happen just sucks,” McCarron said.
Left tackle Andrew Whitworth, though also disappointed, brought a more positive spin on the end of the Bengals’ 12-win season when he said, “People keep calling it something bad or negative that we keep making the playoffs, but nobody talks about the resiliency and the fact that we lose and we put our big boy pants back on and we fought our (butts) off to get back here and we show up again the next year. There’s not many teams in this league that have the ability to do that.”
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