The Steelers Are Who We Thought They Were

“The Hangover” grossed over $250 million in box office receipts this summer and, I’m not proud to admit that in my dissipated youth I once had a hangover so evil I swear I threw up two subway tokens, but in light of the Pittsburgh Steelers victory over the San Diego Chargers on Sunday night, it seems that reports of the champs Super Bowl hangover have been greatly over-estimated.

On Sunday night, the Steelers pistol-whipped the Chargers for a solid 38 minutes before inexplicably letting Phillip Rivers and company up off the carpet, through two heinous special teams miscues and the defense going into turtle-mode, thus allowing Antonio Gates to roam free through the middle of the field. As my buddy Prong! noted, leave it to the 2009 Steelers to create a new category of football game — the nail-biting blowout.

The Steelers offense kept it going, kept piling dirt on top of the deep hole they had put the Chargers in, as much maligned second year back Rashard Mendenhall did his best Franco Harris imitation and Ben Roethlisberger was positively Roethlisbergian. Though not a perfect game, it was a good win for the champs, crucial, even. Even better news was that the offensive line opened holes and Mendenhall showed flashes of brutality, running like the closer they’ve been looking for since Jerome Bettis’ retirement.

But a record marred by both dubious wins and an equal number of dubious losses has given Pittsburgh fans the yips. It’s understandable: fans haven’t stopped twitching over the teams’ 2006 performance, when they followed up their victory in Super Bowl XL with one of the worst hangovers in NFL history. Roethlisberger was problematic following his near death run in with a Buick LeSabre and Coach Bill Cowher seemed to have checked out long before the season began. They started that season 2-6. It was so bad that ESPN’s Bill Simmons wrote that the team should just send out a photograph of a turd at midfield as the 2006 team picture. He was right.

But even without post-traumatic stress lingering from 2006, consensus seems to be that this Steelers team is a pale imitation of last year’s version, that coach Tomlin had too soft a training camp, and that the defense is old and broken down. I’ll grant that they’re a hard team to figure out, but are they really that different from last year? Is it possible we’re remembering them as being more dominant than they actually were?

I would suggest that, as Denny Green might say, they are who we thought they were and while last year’s model relied on a dominant, bruising defense which we haven’t seen much of — yet — the 2008 Steelers rarely ran away with things.

It took overtime to beat the Baltimore Ravens in the fourth week of 2008 and the following week, they needed a late fourth quarter drive win against Jacksonville, as Roethlisberger hit Hines Ward for the go-ahead touchdown with just under two minutes left to play.

Then they lost two. First they went down to the Giants, as they gave up a special teams safety, a field goal and a 68 yard touchdown drive in the 4th quarter, before dropping another home game to the Colts. That beauty featured the Steelers taking a three-point lead mid-way through the 4th quarter, only to permit Peyton Manning to drive his team down the field and toss a touchdown pass to Dominic Rhodes with under two minutes left.

Are you getting the feeling that these Steelers are very much like those Steelers?

Of course, there was the crazy, bugged out 11-10 victory over the San Diego Chargers in Week 11, which Pittsburgh followed up with a victory over the Cowboys. The Steelers took advantage of Tony Romo being Tony Romo to close that one out as Romo tossed a last-minute lollipop which was neatly intercepted and returned for a touchdown by Deshea Townsend. Romo is as Romo does.

Sure, there were some blow outs of bad teams along the way, too. The Browns, the Bengals, the Texans, and the Browns again, naturally. But to win the division, Santonio Holmes worked on his tight-rope end-zone walking act in Baltimore, in what turned out to be a nice preview of his perfected version in the Super Bowl.

Again, is 2009 really all that different? So far, the Steelers beat the Tennessee Titans in overtime in the opening game, then lost two in a row, one at the Chicago Bears and the other at the Cincinnati, by a total of six points. (Of course, they blew 4th quarter leads in each of those.) Then they had the two-headed hydra of a game against the Chargers – the aforementioned nail-biter of a blow out.

So it seems to me that these Steelers actually are those Steelers. Perhaps with a more vanilla defense, due to the absence of the deity known as Troy Polamalu. The Steelers defense has many good players and fine NFL-caliber back ups, but Polamalu is simply transcendent. Without him, the defense is good; with him, the defense is a weapon of mass destruction.

In short, meet the new season, just like the old season, wherein they miss the Troy and haven’t quite jelled. So long as they have Roethlisberger, they’ve got a punchers chance and I refuse to worry. Unless they drop a game to the Lions or the Browns. Then I’ll be driving the PTSD-Super-Bowl-Hangover-Express.