Success Comes With Passing

With Ben Roethlisberger as their quarterback, the Pittsburgh Steelers are demonstrating a distinctive offensive talent. Though they don’t like to throw the ball, they can morph into a passing team when they have to -- as they did to win last week.

Assuming they stick with the pass at Denver today, peg the Steelers to upset the Broncos in what appears to be the real Super Bowl, the AFC title game.

In the actual Super Bowl at Detroit on Feb. 5, the Steelers figure to have even less trouble with the NFC champion, Carolina or Seattle.

Although the Seahawks are favored today, the Panthers will be in Seattle with uncanny Steve Smith, the receiver who’s always open.

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How to Win

Conventional wisdom on how to win playoff games is to run and stop the run. But the modern -- and most exact -- definition is to pass and stop the pass. The Steelers opened with that formula at Indianapolis and stayed with it just long enough to edge Peyton Manning, 21-18.

Roethlisberger passed -- frequently on first down -- and they attacked Manning unmercifully, blitzing him from all angles. The result was predictable. The Steelers took a 21-3 lead and held it well into the third quarter.

Then they went away from their first-half game plan. They quit passing and stopped scoring. And defensively, instead of rushing Manning, they laid back and tried unsuccessfully to keep an eye on his receivers.

That made it a crowd-pleaser, for, when he isn’t rushed, Manning can drive on and on with spectacular passes. Yet, it was only after the Steelers ceased harassing him that he whipped in two touchdown passes on two fast, long moves in the fourth quarter, closing Pittsburgh’s lead from 18 points to three.

Alarmed, the Steelers resumed blitzing and squelched Manning, but then they ran into trouble and only pulled it out with the defensive play of the game -- Roethlisberger tackling a flying, wide-open Colt, Nick Harper, who was headed for the end zone after scooping up a Jerome Bettis fumble.

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Lucky Draft Choice

The Steelers’ luckiest draft choice in more than 30 years -- since they brought in the Terry Bradshaw generation in the 1970s to win four Super Bowls -- was quarterback Roethlisberger, whom they found two years ago.

They found him at Miami of Ohio, which is something less than a football factory.

A great passer nonetheless, Roethlisberger gives the NFL’s most conservative coaching staff the best of two worlds.

Given a choice, Coach Bill Cowher would run the ball on every play. Stuck in a passing era, he turns to Roethlisberger only when he needs a few well-placed passes to win. Then he resumes running.

As Coach Bill Belichick proved in New England when he got quarterback Tom Brady, the road to success in a passing era is to keep throwing the ball to get a lead before running to hold the lead.

The problem is judging when a lead is safe. At Indianapolis, Cowher nearly blew it

The central question of the Pittsburgh-Denver game is whether Roethlisberger will be allowed to keep the Steelers’ pass-offense pressure on the Denver defense long enough to take Pittsburgh to the Super Bowl.

The Steelers run the ball so well that they would be close to invincible if they’d regularly force the defense to worry about two distinctively different things at once -- a throw by Big Ben or a run by Willie Parker or Jerome Bettis.

In baseball terminology, Parker is the setup man, Bettis the closer. But it’s Roethlisberger who makes the Steelers go. If Cowher were a pass-first coach, they might win by 50 points every week.

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Passing Wins

The Broncos are back in the AFC championship because they came out passing last week and passed well enough to eliminate a famous passing team, New England.

Often called a running team as a result of their mastery of the stretch-play offense, the Broncos roared into the postseason prepared for playoff football -- that is, passing football -- and played it pretty well.

Although NFL coaches and commentators continue to express unbounded faith in running plays, last weekend’s games proved their judgment unfounded. Pittsburgh and Carolina won the two Sunday games with effective pass offenses and solid pass defenses. And twice on Saturday, Seattle and Denver also won that way.

All four times, for as long as the games were on the line, running backs weren’t much seen except in short yardage.

Three of the four losing teams also came out passing -- all but the Washington Redskins. The most surprising of these was Chicago against Carolina, for the Bears are a widely known defensive team that prefers to run the ball.

But as the wiser coaches all seem to understand, they can run their way into the playoffs -- but not far into the playoffs.

Rain or shine, warm weather or cold, the playoffs are passing time for two reasons. A good defensive team can take out a good running back if it wants to. Second, a running-play offense moves too slowly. It requires too many plays to get down the same field that a passer can cover with a couple of throws.

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Luck’s End

The Patriots’ bid for a third consecutive Super Bowl triumph ended in Denver when their luck all ran out in one night.

As most NFL champions have found, it takes injury luck and much other good fortune to win the Super Bowl even once. To win that game three times in four years -- particularly by only three points each time -- the Patriots needed a lot more than their share of luck, and got it.

But not last week. Not at Denver.

The Broncos weren’t lucky to win. They earned this one. But the Patriots were a bit unlucky to lose.

For, in a 27-13 game, Denver’s decisive first 17 points all resulted from controversial plays -- a pass-interference penalty that could have been called on either team, or neither; a possible false-start penalty that wasn’t called; and a bouncing-football play that went to instant replay to decide whether it set up a touchback or a touchdown.

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Eight Big Plays

It took a record run of misfortune to end the Patriots’ record Super Bowl run -- in all, eight strange or controversial incidents:

* Sure-handed Patriot Kevin Faulk muffed a punt at the Patriot 40. He picked this game to fumble the ball away although he rarely does such a thing.

* On the next play, a first-down Bronco pass, Patriot safety Asante Samuel and Bronco receiver Ashley Lelie appeared to be equally guilty, or equally innocent, of pass interference. When the officials ruled against Samuel, the Broncos had a first down on the Patriot one-yard line and scored an easy touchdown to take a 7-3 lead.

* On the ensuing kickoff, the Bronco kicker knocked possession away from Patriot rookie Ellis Hobbs when, inadvertently, he rammed his helmet into the ball.

* Four plays later, after the Broncos had been stopped for three downs, they succeeded on a 50-yard field goal that would have been a 55-yard try if the officials had seen what the Patriots saw before the kick: a Bronco false start. The Patriots lost their protest and the Broncos led, 10-3.

All four of these incidents were compressed into one minute of the first half. Nor did the Patriots’ luck change with the change of halves:

* Brady finally made a big mistake. On third down at the Bronco five-yard line, under intense pressure, Brady threw one high and inside, and Bronco safety Champ Bailey picked it off and returned it 100 yards, initiating a 14-point swing.

* When Patriot tight end Benjamin Watson ran Bailey down after 100 yards, he set up another one-yard Denver touchdown. As Bailey fumbled, the ball sailed high -- either out of bounds or into the end zone. After analyzing instant replay, the officials said out of bounds.

* Another sure-handed Patriot, Troy Brown, muffed a punt, the third fumble of the game for the team that rarely fumbles.

* Patriots’ kicker Adam Vinatieri, who seemingly never misses, missed.

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One-Man Team

Carolina, having advanced to today’s NFC title game in Seattle, will show off football’s only one-man team. That’s wide receiver Steve Smith, who, when passer Jake Delhomme gets the ball near enough for him to reach, is incredibly always open to make catches and runs.

The Seahawks, with Matt Hasselbeck at quarterback, are a better passing team than the Panthers but possibly not a better team -- if, as expected, Smith continues to play as he’s played all season, and the Seahawks defend him as awkwardly as others have.

Aside from Smith, a product of South Los Angeles and Utah who stands only 5 feet 9 and weighs under 185, the Panthers are short-handed for a Super Bowl pretender at this stage of the season.

They are down to their third-string running back after losing DeShaun Foster and Stephen Davis to injury. And Delhomme is the streakiest NFL passer still standing.

Although he seems to play better football in the playoffs than in the regular season, Delhomme is more celebrated for his occasional big plays than for consistency.

To win a shootout from the Chicago Bears last week, 29-21, he charged out throwing and scoring every time Chicago’s new passer, Rex Grossman, produced Bear touchdowns.

Principally, Delhomme, with 434 yards of total offense, was demolishing the Bears’ image as a defensive power. For his normally low-scoring team, Grossman drove in 21 points for the Bears only to be done in by his defense.

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Hasselbeck MVP

The Seahawks turned back offensively weak Washington, 20-10, last week, doing it with Hasselbeck’s passes. Early on, an injury took out running back Shaun Alexander, who led the NFL in rushing this season. His absence created a sense of all is lost for Seahawk fans and commentators.

In truth, the injury made the Seahawks a sure winner, forcing them to rely on Hasselbeck.

A good downfield passer, Hasselbeck had been conscripted all season by the West Coast offense approach favored by his coach, Mike Holmgren, who has been leaning heavily on Alexander’s runs mixed in with Hasselbeck’s short passes.

The West Coast is the most effective offense in pro football history, for it converted the NFL from a running-play league into what it is now -- a predominantly passing league. But short-pass teams are less successful in this era than such downfield passing teams as New England, Indianapolis, Denver and Pittsburgh -- when, that is, Pittsburgh is going with Roethlisberger’s passes.

Hasselbeck isn’t a sure thing to outpoint Carolina today -- the Seahawks can only make his job tougher if they waste too much time running the ball with Alexander -- but Hasselbeck was the real Seattle MVP this season.