The Pittsburgh Steelers should never, ever be pushed around
The disaster of the 2020 Pittsburgh Steelers’ playoff “run” cemented the downfall of what had been, for decades, one of the most formidable and admirable organizations in sports.
Now, it’s a laughingstock, a perennial doormat to the premier franchises in the National Football League.
There is no identity to this roster. There are no captains on the field. Year to year, draft and free agency philosophies twist in the wind. Today it’s this guy, tomorrow it’s that guy. An alarming number of skilled players drafted highly by this franchise have simply after a few years declined to play here, players whom no quality franchise would attempt to build a team around.
They collect their paychecks and post to their Twitter accounts, and then they trail 28-0 in a home playoff game before they’re done hitting the snooze alarm.
Defenders of the status quo (who are still defending it, somehow) always point to regular season record, a head-scratching anomaly. They never point to playoff irrelevancy for the last 10 years, one appearance (an embarrassing, blowout loss) in an AFC Championship Game, a host of embarrassing losses year after year to inept opponents.
One wonders how this organization evaluates players. There’s something that used to be known as “Steeler Football.” Several generations of Steeler players earned the utmost respect not for the amount of wins (which were enormous) but for how they played the game. Art Rooney Sr. used to take pride in how his generally awful teams of the ’50s and ’60s always played hard, played tough, whatever the score. Not intimidated. Opponents knew they were in for 3 hours of serious football.
Exactly. You don’t have to win every game. Fans understand teams can’t win the Super Bowl every year. They do want to believe in “Steeler Football.” When 3 star players are standing around waiting for Cleveland to recover a fumbled snap on the first play of a game, perhaps trying to figure out what type of tight end should be acquired in this offseason, it doesn’t really look like “Steeler Football.”
There used to be an extraordinary standard. Said Jack Lambert after Super Bowl XIV, “I thought that our defense, uh, didn’t play with the intensity that we’re accustomed to playing with, and I was somewhat concerned about- about that fact, but I think we came out in the 2nd half and played Steelers football. ... Joe and I talked about it at halftime, we figured we had to get some intensity back up out there, and we did it in the 2nd half.”
And that was after an enormous achievement, a 2nd back-to-back title, a game won by 12 points.
Lambert had similar sentiments in the locker room after Super Bowl X.
“Well I felt that, uh, in the first half, uh, we were intimidated a little bit, and uh, the Pittsburgh Steelers aren’t supposed to be intimidated. We’re supposed to be intimidators.”
They were once.
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Even the losses were glorious, in their own depressing way.
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Such was the case in the 1979 AFC Championship Game (played Jan. 6, 1980), when all 4 broadcasters from the NBC crew — Dick Enberg, Merlin Olsen, Mike Adamle and Bryant Gumbel — permanently marred a glorious victory and signature moment of perhaps history's greatest team by strongly implying the game was decided by officiating.
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onto that pass?
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The Steelers showed up for Super Bowl XXX at Sun Devil Stadium a little tense against the mighty Dallas Cowboys.
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