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Lucky Again? Logic Says No
By John Mehno

Not that anyone wants to hear it, but a safe bet for the NFL season is that the Steelers won't repeat as Super Bowl champions.

The odds are firmly in your favor since back-to-back titles are rare in this age of salary cap-induced parity.

Beyond that, even the most ardent Steelers supporter has to be rational enough to recognize that everything fell into place for last year's championship run. Cincinnati quarterback Carson Palmer got hurt, Mike Vanderjagt missed a field goal for Indianapolis, Ben Roethlisberger made an unlikely tackle, maybe some calls in the Super Bowl were generous.

That doesn't mean that the Steelers weren't deserving champions, it just means they enjoyed one of those magic-dusted runs where a lot of things went right. Sometimes the key to winning is having a Hall of Famer like Jackie Smith drop a touchdown pass that hits him squarely in the numbers. The 1976 Steelers played stifling defense but came up a game short of the Super Bowl because running backs Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier were both injured and unavailable to play in the AFC Championship game. Sometimes your quarterback survives a near-fatal motorcycle accident with no lingering effects, then winds up missing the season opener because of appendicitis. Things happen.

One of the things that made 2005 so special was the improbability of it all. The Steelers went from near elimination to playing their best football precisely when it mattered most.

This wasn't the 1970s, when the Steelers were vastly better than all but one or two teams. There are a lot of good teams in the AFC, the Steelers among them. Logic says they won't repeat. Your heart can root all year for logic to be wrong.

In other matters...

o The Pirates clearly need a significant lefthanded bat for the middle of their lineup. To swing a trade for a quality hitter, general manager Dave Littlefield will have to go against the pattern he's established in his five-plus seasons on the job. He's never traded a good player when he didn't absolutely have to. Look over his record and he's certainly dealt away All-Star caliber players. But they've all had contract issues that made trades necessary. Sometimes you get lucky and make a steal like Cam Bonifay did when he got Brian Giles from Cleveland for reliever Ricardo Rincon. You can't count on that, though. If you want quality, you'd better be prepared to give up comparable talent. The Pirates' impressive stash of young pitching will interest teams looking to deal. If it takes one of those young arms to get the power bat the Pirates sorely lack, Littlefield has to make the deal.

o The Penguins visited West Point for a boot camp-like experience in training camp. There was a time in Penguins history when Scotty Bowman was in danger of being one of those generals who gets shot by his own troops.

o You occasionally hear people advocating new statues outside the sports venues. Please, no more. PNC Park already has three, which should be capacity. Art Rooney is deserving at Heinz Field and seems to fit in his familiar pose. Any more would be overkill and give away the region's obsession with sports. Let's get out of the statue business.

o The latest trend among the Steelers is classic cars. Some of them are tooling around in 1974 models. That was the season of the team's first Super Bowl. To today's players, that's "vintage." To a lot of fans, it's last week.

John Mehno has been covering the Pittsburgh sports scene since 1974. He can be reached at: johnmehno@lycos.com.