No quit in resilient Steelers
PITTSBURGH – Go ahead, give up on the Pittsburgh Steelers. It just seems to strengthen their resolve to get the job done.
I did it several times in this weird, wacky NFL season. I all but buried them when they lost their first two games in what had been predicted to be a Steelers waltz through the AFC championship game and into Super Bowl XXXVII.
I wrote them off again after losing a home game to the expansion Houston Texans.
And, unlike the players, I gave the Steelers no chance of completing Sunday’s amazing comeback against the Cleveland Browns. It has been such an emotional roller-coaster ride for the team this season, I thought the team had hit the wall, that there was nothing left to give.
How wrong I was … again.
I didn’t underestimate their talent. The Steelers have plenty of that. What I underestimated was their resilience, their ability to believe against all odds that they could band together and get this improbable job done.
And then to pull it off.
They all believed from the opening kickoff until the final seconds ticked off the clock. Not one of them thought it couldn’t be done.
“Never,” Plaxico Burress said. “Not for one minute. If I thought we couldn’t win the game, I wouldn’t be out there playing.”
According to coach Bill Cowher, this resiliency isn’t something he can take credit for teaching. It is something that just happened because of a lot of factors, perhaps most important being the chemistry in the locker room.
“I think it has grown through the course of the season,” Cowher said. “I think it comes from when you had the high expectations and the criticisms that came through the period of time when we weren’t playing well. You learn to overcome that and become hardened.
“I think it’s something that you can’t talk about, but you have to experience. The bottom line is we are making plays when we have to make plays. That is the way it has to continue to be. I don’t know how much further this is going to take us, but we are going to continue to take it one game at a time.”
True enough, this euphoria could last only six days. The Steelers might go into Nashville next Saturday and lay an egg so big they won’t be able to climb out from under it. Regardless, we should know now that they will battle right down to the end.
At the heart of it all is quarterback Tommy Maddox, who recently walked away with the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year award for reasons far different than what happened Sunday afternoon. Yet even though he is the catalyst in the eyes of many of his teammates, Maddox points right back at the players who see him as a hero.
“The thing that makes it so much fun to play on this team is that whether things are going good or things are going bad, everybody is relaxed and stays calm on the sidelines,” Maddox said. “There is never a sense of pointing fingers, there is never a sense that you have to do this or you have to do that. It is, we have time to win.
“Everybody on the sidelines kept believing that and that is the main thing. Everybody believed we could win and kept going out there and played as hard as they could. There were guys out there who were hurt, that didn’t think they had it left, but they were playing great.”
There were a few scenes worth remembering. One was Kendrell Bell being helped off the field when his pain-killing injection was beginning to wear off and the pain in his sprained ankle became unbearable. There were Burress and fellow wide receiver Hines Ward reacting to the clinching touchdown by falling to the ground, half in amazement, half in exhaustion.
“We ran the hurry-up offense the whole second half,” Burress said. “I was exhausted, but Tommy just kept us going. He loosens everybody up. Tommy’s the general out there. If he’s uptight, we’re uptight.”
Suffice to say nobody on Pittsburgh’s roster was the least bit uptight.
They will wake up this morning feeling pretty good about what they accomplished, then they’ll get to work on next week. But that seed already has been planted.
“We don’t want to keep putting ourselves in these types of situations,” Burress said.
It would be suicide to fall hopelessly behind the Titans, but the Steelers know now that it would take a complete collapse for them to be out of a game before it ends.
A few players made bad plays, only to redeem themselves in potential game-turning plays. Mike Logan allowed a touchdown pass that gave Cleveland a 24-7 lead, then he intercepted a pass that led to the Steelers closing to 24-14. Antwaan Randle El muffed a punt return that Cleveland turned into a 14-0 lead, then returned the next punt 66 yards for Pittsburgh’s first score.
“He made some plays for us,” Cowher said of Randle El, who also caught five passes for 85 yards. “The thinking is, don’t take him out of there, he just dropped one. No one felt worse than he did. The guy is a play-maker, he is a football player.”
Randle El and Logan are not alone. There are 51 other football players on this roster and each one had a part in this win.
“We had a lot of offensive plays in the second half,” Maddox said. “The offensive line did an unbelievable job. The receivers kept battling. They were tired, they were sore, they kept getting hit and they just kept battling. The defense did a great job of giving us a chance to win at the end. It was a total team effort and it was a lot of fun.”
So, regardless of what happens for the first three quarters next Saturday in Nashville, it won’t be over for the Steelers until the clock expires.
That much, we know.
Sports editor Mike Ciarochi maybe reached at mciarochi@heraldstandard.com.