Sep 29, 2005 By Alan Robinson Ap Sports Writer 4 min read

PITTSBURGH – The Pittsburgh Steelers have a lot of time on their hands this week, and it has nothing to do with those extra 52 seconds they played Sunday against New England. Because this is the Steelers’ bye week, and they don’t play again until an Oct. 10 Monday night game at San Diego, they’re going 15 days between games – half a month. It’s an exceptionally long time in a sport that normally adheres to an every-week’s-a-game policy, and it’s creating a lot of down time for players unaccustomed to it.

It’s also giving them a l-o-n-g time to reflect on that 23-20 Sunday loss to Super Bowl champion New England, the Steelers’ first during the season in more than a calendar year. As they returned to practice Wednesday, several players talked about wanting this play or that play back, but none wished he had those missing 52 seconds back.

The clock operator accidentally reset the clock following the second play of the fourth quarter, causing the clock to jump back 52 seconds – to the time before a play was run and a penalty was called. That time proved valuable during a game-winning Patriots drive that lasted 81 seconds and led to Adam Vinatieri’s decisive 43-yard field goal with one second remaining.

“Yeah, but that’s after the game; the game’s over with and we have to get on to next week,” cornerback Ike Taylor said. “It’s over, it happened, we lost and we have to get better from it.”

One reason the Steelers weren’t more upset about the mixup is that the Patriots intentionally ran a great amount of time, 45 seconds, off the clock from the time they drove to within field goal range to the time Vinatieri kicked it. The idea was to give the Steelers no time to mount a comeback of their own.

All-Pro guard Alan Faneca said that on the field, it didn’t seem as if the quarter was lasting longer than normal. But he was surprised the error wasn’t caught, given how the game officials sometimes spend several minutes correcting an error of only a couple of seconds.

“They don’t catch everything but it is a surprise,” Faneca said. “They reset the clock, it slipped and it happened to be for a lot of time. What are you going to do? It’s like the coin toss in Detroit on Thanksgiving – what are you going to do?”

Faneca was referring to the Steelers’ 19-16 loss in 1998 when Pittsburgh captain Jerome Bettis appeared to have called the coin toss correctly. Referee Phil Luckett, correctly detecting Bettis changed his call while the coin was in the air, decided Detroit had won the toss. The Lions got the ball and proceeded to kick the game-winning field goal without the Steelers getting the ball again.

That loss instantly turned a good Steelers team into a bad one, and it went from being 7-4 and in strong playoff contention to losing its final five and missing the playoffs with a 7-9 record.

Wide receiver Hines Ward laughed off any suggestion this loss could have a similar effect on a team that, just like that 1998 team, was coming off a season in which it lost the AFC championship game at home.

“We’re still a great team,” Ward said. “It’s one loss. We didn’t play particularly well but still had a chance to win the game against the Super Bowl champions. We’ve got to learn from it and get better, and get a lot of guys healthy and come back and make this 13-game run.”

NOTES: The Oct. 10 game will be the first of three Monday night Steelers games in an eight-week span. They play Baltimore at home Oct. 31 and at Indianapolis on Nov. 28. … Steelers LB Clark Haggans already has three sacks and three forced fumbles. … Despite being held to 55 yards Sunday, Willie Parker leads the AFC in rushing with 327 yards. Edgerrin James of Indianapolis has 324. Tampa Bay’s Cadillac Williams is the league leader with 434.