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Men Of Steel Return Sanity To Playoffs

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By MARTIN FENNELLY

mfennelly@tampatrib.com

Published: January 12, 2009

PITTSBURGH - For two weekends, the NFL postseason, the road to our very own Super Bowl, was for the birds.

It was wild, it was wacky, it took flight and buzzed reality.

The Eagles, Cardinals and Ravens rose and the Giants, Panthers and Titans fell. It was curtains for three of the top four playoff seeds. All the bullies were losing.

Against that backdrop, the upset feverish San Diego Chargers stepped on the field in Pittsburgh. With snow flurries blowing, Norv Turner's 9-8 beachcombers went 75 yards in four plays for a touchdown against the top-ranked defense in football in a city that's a shrine to toughness.

San Diego was beating Pittsburgh's Steelers 7-0.

Then the Men of Steel beat back.

"It wasn't happening here," Steelers linebacker LaMarr Woodley said.

So, with Pittsburgh's 35-24 pounding of San Diego, the AFC championship will go through the North Shore of the Three Rivers, home to Terrible Towels and tailgaters in hunting camouflage and Super Bowl winners and defense and mystique. Through that kind of curtains.

Steelers and Baltimore Ravens officials will hold a conference call today to determine whether either side will wear helmets and pads in Sunday's title game. It's going to be rough stuff.

These Steelers are rough stuff all by themselves. They're coached by Mike Tomlin, a trusted old Bucs hand, but still only 36 and in only his second year as an NFL head coach. Here he is in a title game. His crew comes with him, and it's no polka band.

They'll beat you up on defense (San Diego ran the ball 12 times Sunday ... for 15 yards) and they'll beat you up on offense. They'll sack you. Sack? At one point, Woodley grabbed Rivers and rag-dolled him to the ground violently. Rivers was woozy. "Nothing dirty, but woozy is what we want," Woodley said. They're the Steelers.

They will run over you when they're right, as a resurgent Willie Parker did over San Diego for 146 yards and two touchdowns.

"We played our kind of football today," Tomlin said.

Ahead 14-10 at halftime, they laid down a third quarter that was all steel and legend. They owned the football for all but 17 seconds of the third period. The Steelers ran 25 plays and the Chargers ran one, and on the one, the Steelers intercepted.

Everywhere you looked there were upsets this weekend, home teams losing, everywhere but here. Here, sanity was made of steel.

The Ravens are the AFC's sixth seed, but won at top seed Tennessee. The six-seed Eagles were 5-5-1 after 11 games, so naturally they bumped off the defending Super Bowl champion Giants at the Meadowlands. And the Cardinals, who'd won exactly one playoff game across the previous half-century, won their second in as many weeks by blowing out the Panthers in Carolina. Got all that?

Take a deep breath of frigid Pittsburgh air.

Why not the Chargers? Why not the first .500 Super Bowl team? The Steelers said why not. It wasn't happening here. Tough is tough, and that goes for quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who was back after suffering a concussion in the regular-season closer. He was Big Ben enough.

The defense, smashed in the mouth to start the afternoon, smashed back, like it has all season, drawing comparisons to the great defenses of the modern era, even being dubbed "Steel Curtain II" in this town, a papal nod if there ever was one. This Curtain leads football in total defense, pass defense and scoring defense, and was nearly the best run defense, except the Ravens were slightly better.

The AFC title game will go through the North Shore of the Three Rivers.

This weekend was for the birds.

Then Terrible Towels flapped in Pittsburgh.

Make no mistake.

Sunday will be about steel.

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