Even amid the revelry, minutes after the Pittsburgh Steelers had finished off the Jets to secure their meeting with the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl on Feb. 6, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin did not skirt a fundamental truth about how his team played.
“We kind of limped home, but we aren’t going to complain about style points,” Tomlin said.
The Packers and the Steelers did not so much roar as scratch their way to the Super Bowl. If this were college football, these two teams might not be meeting for the championship at all.
Photo: AFP
Both teams looked dominant early in their conference championship games. The Steelers outrushed the Jets’ ground-and-pound offense, 135 yards to 1, in a first half in which they raced to a 24-0 lead. The Packers shredded the Bears on a seven-play touchdown drive that included four completions on four pass attempts.
And then the best parts of their teams — the Packers’ offense and the Steelers’ defense — flailed.
“Frankly, the first drive was the way we anticipated coming into the game,” Packers coach Mike McCarthy said. “We lost Chad Clifton on the touchdown and we really didn’t get back into the balance and rhythm we clearly had on the first drive.”
Photo: AFP
So neither team will arrive in the Dallas area looking invincible. Does it matter? No. Last year the New Orleans Saints lost two second-half leads and had to win in overtime in the NFC championship game before winning the Super Bowl.
Three years ago, the New England Patriots took the lead early in the second quarter and never lost it in the AFC championship game, then lost their perfect season in the Super Bowl. The lesson: Momentum in the NFL is illusory, if it exists at all.
It depends less on what happened on Sunday than it will on whether the Steelers’ Pro Bowl center, Maurkice Pouncey, can play after sustaining a high ankle sprain early in the game (he says he will) and if the cornerbacks who looked as vulnerable as they have all season in the second half against the Jets can lock down the NFL’s best receiving corps. It will also depend on whether Rodgers can regain the touch that helped the Packers win their first two playoff games, but which eluded him against Chicago (two interceptions and 17 of 30 passing).
The difference between blowouts and nail-biters on Sunday was as small as an Ike Taylor slip that allowed a Santonio Holmes touchdown, and a Disney-movie moment by Caleb Hanie.
The fits and starts of Sunday’s games were microcosms of both teams’ seasons. The Packers had no running game for much of the year and when Rodgers sustained a concussion and the Packers lost to the Patriots in December, their postseason hopes seemed doomed. They had to win on the final day of the season to make the playoffs and they will now try to become the first NFC sixth seed to win the Super Bowl.
The Steelers were given little chance when Roethlisberger was suspended for the first four games of the season and even less chance when his top two backups were injured.
These were not the Colts and the Saints of last year, who were clearly the best teams in their conferences the entire season. These teams dealt with ebbs and flows and late on Sunday night, Roethlisberger spoke of the tenacity of the Steelers. Hines Ward noted that the Steelers performance had traditionally gone up and down.
For two franchises steeped in football history, then, their next shot at a championship will be defined not by their current-day quarterbacks who throw deep passes, but by dipping into the well of grittiness that has long been part of their lore. They just got started on Sunday.
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