Ready to reboot a robust rivalry
Patriots and Steelers have long history
FOXBORO >> In an honest moment Tuesday, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin drew a parallel between Pittsburgh and the Patriots that might be disputed in Foxboro, but should be obvious to any outside observer.
“They’re a transitional group, as well,” Tomlin said. “Like us.”
It’s true. The only NFL franchises with six Super Bowl titles have been delayed in their respective quests for No. 7. On Sunday, the Pats and Steelers will meet for the first time since 2019, the last year either team was viewed as a legitimate title threat.
Over the last two seasons, Pittsburgh paid the price for clinging to its past, dragging Ben Roethlisberger back under center well after the life in his right arm was gone. Meanwhile, the Patriots paid for failing to honor their past, cutting ties with Tom Brady without a succession plan, then turning to Cam Newton and a rookie in Mac Jones.
In Year 2 with Jones, the Patriots are still not positioned to contend. They own the fifth-worst playoff odds in the AFC, one step above the Steelers, who own the fourth-worst and picked a quarterback in the first round of last April’s draft, the surest sign of an NFL rebuild. Pittsburgh has, however, stayed afloat, winning 22 games over the last twoplus seasons.
Because that’s what the Steelers do.
“Fifteen straight (nonlosing) seasons,” Bill Belichick noted Friday. “That’s pretty impressive.”
Oddly enough, staying afloat is also how Tomlin complimented the Patriots after calling them transitional.
“I think if you’re playing the New England team, they will always have a high floor,” Tomlin said. “They won’t beat themselves, they won’t be highly penalized, they will play the field-positioning game. They’ll work to win the weighty moments.”
What Tomlin described above is a brand. Under Belichick, the Patriots have established themselves as championship shapeshifters, who alter their playing style every week based on their next opponent. But the tenets of Belichick’s program have been constant for two decades.
The Patriots prioritize smart, tough players who play well under pressure. The organization has no allegiance to a particular scheme or style. Only winning.
The Steelers have their own brand, one that almost pre-dates the Patriots as a franchise. Through lines can be drawn from the Tomlin era back to the 1970s, when the legendary Chuck Noll baptized Pittsburgh as a football town through his hard-nosed championship teams. Since then, the Steelers have generally been a defense-first operation known for their physicality and opportunism.
Their front office even targets the same types of players today as it did under Tomlin’s predecessor, Bill Cowher.
“It’s almost like you can look at a college player and say, ‘Oh, he would play there for the Steelers,'” Belichick said. “Whether that’s this year, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago — you can see player’s skills and how they would use them, and this would be a perfect Steeler.”
While the Patriots and Steelers may diverge in brand, overlap is what best defines their on-again, offagain rivalry.
“Even without (Brady and Roethlisberger), you’re still talking about two teams that are built very similarly throughout the years of how they play the game,” Pats safety Devin McCourty said this week. “And what’s important (to them).”
And that is no accident. Pittsburgh was the original bar the Patriots had to clear at the dawn of their dynasty. In two of their first three Super Bowl seasons, the Steelers finished with the best regular-season record in the AFC. Come January, the Pats had to roll into Pittsburgh and topple them for the conference title. They did.
Belichick won partially by stealing or replicating pieces of Pittsburgh’s operation, namely ex-Steeler Mike Vrabel, a staple of his best defenses and a threetime Super Bowl champion. The Pats played the same defensive style, employing a bruising 3-4 front in an era of four-down defense. And they ran an ErhardtPerkins offense, same as the Steelers, though the two were not connected.
Of course, the Steelers also took something from the Patriots. On Oct. 31, 2004, Pittsburgh ended the Patriots’ NFL record 21game win streak, a game Belichick casually referred to Friday as “the Halloween game.” Because no football history, even for the greatest coach of all time, can be retold without a few Steeler scares.
Noll’s final game was a 17-10 win at the expense of Belichick’s Browns in Dec. 1991. That day, Steelers quarterback Bubby Brister went 7-of-26 en route to defeating one of the sharpest defensive minds in football history.
Years later, Pittsburgh beat the 1994 Browns, Belichick’s best team in Cleveland, three times with an unstoppable downfield passing game.
Two staple Steeler plays, one involving four vertical routes and another that paired two vertical routes with short, out-breaking routes — forced Belichick and then defensive coordinator Nick Saban to reconsider how they fundamentally called defense. Neither straight man or zone worked.
So, they concocted a scheme that would morph into either man coverage or zone based on how the receivers’ routes declared downfield. Today, patternmatch coverage is taught across all leagues and levels of football. Thanks to Belichick, but because of the Steelers. Their excellence forced the desperation that yielded another show of his genius.
“They’re always a team that when you play them, you get to see what you’re made of,” McCourty said.
Now, thanks to leaguewide offensive innovation and the overall elevation of quarterback play, the NFL has caught up to the Patriots. They are, like the Steelers, a team propped by their past hoping to race into the future. The two franchises have never been more alike.
Even Tomlin’s dismount from his long-winded assessment of the Patriots on Tuesday was perfectly Belichickian.
“New England is New England,” he said.
On Sunday, the Patriots and Steelers’ shared history will give kickoff a weight most Week 2 games don’t carry. A sense it means more.
“I remember a few years ago, Bill said, ‘If you like competition, if you like football, that’s where you want to be,”‘ McCourty said. And I think any time these teams play, it’s a big deal.”
Sure, the Patriots have won most of the Belichickera battles. And all of the important ones. But each of them, even the AFC title games, meant more because it was Pittsburgh.
That’s rivalry. Real rivalry. Even now, after three years apart and with murky futures ahead of each franchise, Pats-Steelers is widely expected to deliver again on Sunday.
Not bad for a couple teams in transition.