In his weekly press conference, Mike Tomlin was asked if he considered using one of his two timeouts on defense to preserve time, either after the long pass play to the 7-yard line or after the first-down run.
“I did, but to be quite honest with you I chose not to. I was more interested in stopping them. Particularly I knew if I didn’t utilize a timeout that the run game would be an element of the sequence and I felt comfortable about our ability to stop the run. So I was more interested in winning the sequence and less interested in the number of timeouts I was holding if we were to lose the sequence.