The Steelers/Bengals game turned into a chaotic farce of football Saturday night.. 

Paul Doughterty, a sports writer from Ohio, expresses the feelings of a nation who watched the dangerous game: 

Too many stupid things happened. Passion has its place in football. Reckless stupidity does not.

I won’t go into detail about the game, its frantic finish yet another eye-stab. You saw it. You don’t need to read about it.

It’s mindless to blame a few plays or a few players for a loss that had more twists than a medieval thumb screw. It might have been easier had the Bengals lost 15-0. Chalk it up to another playoff fade. Only, they didn’t fade. They took the lead, 16-15, and with a first down at the Steelers’ 26 with 1:36 left, had the game won.

Only this is January and these are the Bengals so Jeremy Hill, bless him, fumbled. Then Ben Roethlisberger, whose right shoulder was ground meat, took Pittsburgh 74 yards in nine plays. Chris Boswell kicked a 35-yard field goal with 14 seconds left to send Cincinnati to its most crushing loss in … forever.

It was a nasty, nasty playoff game.