MVN - Most Valuable Network

Not great, not very good. Just good.

I’m going to echo some of the sentiments raised in expressed in previous posts about Sunday’s loss and the season in general. The Steelers are a good team. They’re better than the average NFL team, but they are not elite. Mike Tomlin said as much after the loss. He also said the defense wasn’t playing well - perhaps the biggest understatement of his short career. The defense is playing horribly. Over the last two weeks, I had to remind myself that I was watching the Steelers - the tough, working class, blue collar Steelers. They’ve been getting manhandled. It’s not pretty.

So where did it all go wrong? Who knows. Each of us could probably look at the last 3 or 4 weeks and pick a point at which the Steelers began to lose it. For me, it’s Anthony Smith’s ridiculous guarantee. He was embarrassed against the Pats (the rest of the defense didn’t play much better) and the defense brought a general malaise into Sunday’s game against the Jags. Steelers don’t make guarantees - it’s not the team’s way. To borrow a phrase from Tom Brady, the Steelers used to do their talking on the field. Not this year, at least not for the last few weeks.

So where does this leave us? I’d like to believe that we can go on a run similar to the one we had in 2005, but I know that’s unlikely. We’re a good team, not a great one. We can give other good teams good games, and might be able to knock off one of the great ones if the breaks go out way. Whatever happens, I hope the old Steelers - the tough, hardnosed Steelers who let their play do the talking - show up in the playoffs.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Opinion, Steelers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.