INDIANAPOLIS — Ben Roethlisberger and Antonio Brown hooked up for three touchdowns Thursday night and the Pittsburgh Steelers’ defense shut down the Indianapolis Colts in a 28-7 victory.

The Steelers (6-5) helped their playoff chances with a second straight win, and snapped a four-game losing streak on Thanksgiving.

Colts quarterback Andrew Luck sat out with a concussion, and his absence showed as Indy’s first winning streak of the season ended at two games. While his replacement, Scott Tolzien, hung tough most of the night, the performance wasn’t good enough to extend the Colts’ 10-game winning streak on Thursday nights.

The Steelers built a 21-7 lead by scoring touchdowns on each of their first three possessions – a 5-yard TD run from Le’Veon Bell, and touchdown catches by Brown of 25 and 33 yards.

Indy’s only score came on a 5-yard TD pass from Tolzien to Donte Moncrief early in the second quarter, a play set up by the first completion of Pat McAfee’s career on a fake punt.

The Colts had two chances to cut the deficit but Tolzien was stopped twice on third-down runs at the 1-yard line, and the Steelers forced incompletions on both fourth-down plays.

Pittsburgh sealed it with – what else? – a 22-yard TD pass from Roethlisberger to Brown with 5:30 left.

Roethlisberger was 14 of 20 for 221 yards, Brown caught five passes for 91 yards and Bell ran 23 times for 120 yards.

Tolzien finished 22 of 36 for 205 yards with one TD and two interceptions.

NOTES

JOHN MADDEN, the definitive voice of NFL broadcasts for so many years, remains a powerful voice and he plainly spelled out just what’s wrong with the league’s foray into Thursday night games and why its TV ratings have slumped.

The problem, as the Hall of Famer sees it, is there aren’t enough good, competitive teams for all the TV slots – “an early Sunday window, a late Sunday window, a Sunday night window, a Monday night window, a Thursday night window” – the NFL now has to fill each week. That Thursday night game in particular is a problem for him.

“Something has to be done about ‘Thursday Night Football,'” the 80-year-old former Raiders coach said in a podcast with the Bay Area News Group. “It just doesn’t work. It’s not only a fan thing, it’s a team thing. It’s a safety thing. It’s a competitive thing. It doesn’t work.

“I know about money and I know about business. Maybe you have to tweak stuff a little more. To help teams, maybe you get a bye the week before.”

Madden, who walked away after the 2009 season, thought it was particularly unfair that Washington had to play a Sunday night home game, then travel to Dallas to play on Thanksgiving Day. The Cowboys had a 1 p.m. home game Sunday.

“That’s wrong. That’s an oops,” Madden said. “You play a team on Sunday night and make them travel and play on Thursday. I remember in my coaching days, as players get older, it takes them longer to heal up from a Sunday game, and guys weren’t ready to play until Thursday or Friday.”

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