Officiating was main reason why the Pittsburgh Steelers lost Sunday night's game to the Los Angeles Chargers. Click on this link if you want to read elaboration about that topic. This story, however, is on one of the other reasons why Pittsburgh lost Sunday night's game. Keenan Allen, Los Angeles' dangerous wideout, caught 14 passes for 148 yards that included a crucial touchdown reception during the Chargers' come-from-behind victory over the Steelers.

Philip Rivers, who completed more than half of his 26 completions to Allen, was asked about the success he had against Pittsburgh's pass defense. In the process, he explained why Allen was able to have such a big impact in Sunday's game.

"This defense is a really good defense," Rivers said. "Their scoring defense, rush defense, pass defense. They really like to match everything and zone everything up. If Keenan is number three, he’s going to get matched up with a linebacker and they just kind of match everything up. They’re dogging backers. They’re all over the place blitzing guys, but not bringing a lot of guys so there are still people out there in zones. It’s not like people are just running free. As you are used to seeing with Keenan, he’s got such body control. He has such great awareness of where they are trying to take him away, so it was just a lot of high percentage stuff to him and then a handful of chunk plays. I don’t know that we anticipated this. Certainly, we know he’s capable because we’ve seen it. We needed every minute of it, that’s for sure and then the way we got the run game going in the second half was huge. The runs we got were big, real big."

Did the Steelers ever make any adjustments with regard to guarding Allen?

"I think they kind of stuck with it," Rivers said. "That is what this team does, they stick with what they do and they do it very well. Keenan [Allen] is a tough cover in the slot and inside. I think the big thing was it wasn’t that we were getting 25-yard chunks, it was the seven, eight, nine-yard gains, there were big third downs or those completions that kept the chains moving and we missed some and we contested some so by no means was it easy but it was good to have the type of game we had."

On Thursday, Pittsburgh defensive coordinator Keith Butler explained what happened with regard to covering Allen.

“There are some things that happened to us that we couldn’t do anything about,” Butler said, via Chris Adamski of the Tribune-Review. “So we had to play the hand we were dealt at the time, and we did.”

Butler was alluding to the absences of safety Morgan Burnett and cornerback Cam Sutton. Burnett missed the game with a back injury, while Sutton was out while tending to a personal issue. That made covering the Chargers' receivers, specifically when playing a dime defense, relatively more challenging.

“You build a gameplan early in the week about what you want to try to do and who you want to play against and stuff like that,” Butler said. “We didn’t have everybody that we wanted to and tried to do the best we could with what we had. So the matchups? Yeah, we were aware of the matchups on us. But the gameplan, I thought, was a good gameplan that worked for us in the first half pretty well.”

Fortunately, Pittsburgh will have both players back for this Sunday's game in Oakland, as the Steelers look to have a better performance against Derek Carr, who completed 29-of-38 passes for 298 yards and three touchdowns in last Sunday's loss to the Kansas City Chiefs.