GOOD MEMORIES AND SOME GOOD LUCK
Steelers-Colts over the years has produced magic, just don’t expect to see any Monday night
We have gathered here today to celebrate better days, like the time Ben Roethlisberger made the most famous tackle in Steelers history, and the time he threw as many touchdown passes in a single game (six) as all of the Steelers quarterbacks have thrown in 10 games this season.
We’ll remember some bizarre moments, as well, like the day a small plane crashed into the upper deck at old Memorial Stadium and the day Jim Harbaugh almost kept the Steelers out of the Super Bowl on a Hail Mary pass.
Basically, we’ll do anything to avoid talking about the Steelers-Colts Monday night matchup. The Steelers are 3-7 for the first time in Mike Tomlin’s tenure. The Colts are 4-6-1 and just hired a television analyst as their head coach. So forget this game.
Let us revel in previous Steelers-Colts encounters, because even if this isn’t really a rivalry, it has produced four of the most indelible games in the Steelers’ 90-year history ...
Oct. 26, 2014, Heinz Field: Did I mention Roethlisberger once threw for as many TD passes in a game as all the Steelers quarterbacks have combined for this season?
This was that day, a miraculous shootout between Roethlisberger and Andrew Luck. The two combined for 922 yards passing and nine touchdowns in the Steelers’ 51-34 victory.
It was one of the rare afternoons I felt honored to be in a football stadium. Playing in his 150th game, Roethlisberger secured his 100th win and played maybe the greatest game any quarterback has ever played.
Who else can say they came close to going 40 of 49 for 522 yards, six touchdowns, zero interceptions and a 150.6 passer rating?
“We still left some plays out there,” Roethlisberger said. Imagine if they hadn’t. Two more ridiculous addons to this one:
1: Roethlisberger threw six more TD passes the next weekend against Baltimore, making for the most prolific back-to-back passing games in league history.
2: In his next appearance against the Colts, less than 14 months later, Roethlisberger went 24 of 39 for 364 yards, four touchdowns and no interceptions. Which means in those two games he went 64 of 88 for 886 yards, 10 TDs and zero picks.
I feel very confident in proclaiming that no one has ever torched an opponent in backto-back games quite like that.
Dec. 19, 1976, Memorial
Stadium: Remember when Tomlin said he expected this year’s defense to be “dominant” and “great”?
Those adjectives couldn’t begin to describe the ’76 defense, which shut out five opponents during a season-ending, nine-game winning streak and held three others to a mere field goal.
Jack Lambert once told NFL Films he believed the 1976 Steelers were the best team in franchise history. He said franchise founder Art Rooney believed the same.
Sadly, the Steelers couldn’t finish the job, largely on account of losing both of their 1,000-yard rushers (Franco Harris, Rocky Bleier) that day in Baltimore during a smashing, 40-14 playoff win. They simply didn’t have enough ammunition for the AFC championship game at Oakland and fell short of a threepeat.
“People forget now because of the four Super Bowls, but we easily could have made it five of six and three in a row,” Bleier later told the Associated Press. “It might never have been broken.″
As bad as the day in Baltimore turned out, it could have been exponentially worse. Shortly after the final gun, a small airplane — a blue-andwhite Piper Cherokee — crashed into recently abandoned seats above the baseball press box. Amazingly, there were no serious injuries. The pilot, Donald Kroner, reportedly had intentions of performing some kind of stunt on national television.
As reporter Steve Melewski put it years later, “Because the Steelers were blowing out the Colts that day, a lot of us around that area left early. Lives were possibly spared
because of the score.”
Jan. 15, 2006, RCA Dome:
Hard to believe, but Roethlisberger’s 500-yard, six-TD game against the Colts ranks just secondon his list of memorablegames against them.
The time he kept Jerome Bettis from becoming Bill Buckner ranks first.
I probably don’t need to remind you that Bettis fumbled at the Colts 2 with 1:20 left in an AFC divisional round game with the Steelers set to salt it away. Or that Roethlisberger subsequently made a serpentine tackle on Nick Harper, who appeared to be headed for a touchdown.
I remember asking Hines Ward what went through his mind as Harper ran.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I just don’t want it to happen to Jerome, have it end like this,’” he said.
This proved to be Bill Cowher’s most impressive victory, as the Steelers avenged a regular season blowout loss to one of the most dynamic teams of the modern era (and a team that started the season 13-0).
The 21-18 win was the game that spurred those Steelers toward greatness. By pulling the upset, their core group of players — the ones who had failed repeatedly in the biggest situations — experienced a profound boost of self-worth.
That’s basically what Bettis once told me about the significance of the win.
“Going into that game, the question for us was, ‘Are you a championship team?’” he said. “Years past, the answer was no. This time, the answer was yes. I think it set up the opportunity for us to be great. The Broncos game (AFC championship) was a formality. We knew we’d beat the socks off those guys.”
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Jan. 14, 1996, Three
Rivers Stadium: I’ll hand off to then-Sports Illustrated writer Michael Silver to describe Harbaugh’s Hail Mary from Cowher’s point of view. A trip to the Super Bowl — which would be the Steelers’ first since 1979 — hung in the balance:
“Either Cowher would be celebrating his newfound status as the youngest coach to take a team to the Super Bowl or he would be haunted by another horrific climax in the south end zone at Three Rivers Stadium.
“Cowher felt queasy. There were 61,062 fans gasping in unison, but Cowher heard nothing. A tangle of Colt receivers and Steeler defenders hit the ground where the ball came down, but Cowher watched none of that. As he stepped onto the playing field, his eyes locked 30 yards downfield on the arms of back judge Tim Millis. The clock expired, time stood still, and what Cowher saw next seemed to happen in slow motion.”
“All I could look at was the arms,” he said later, after the Steelers had advanced to the Super Bowl for the first time in 16 years with a 20-16 victory. “Would he wave them horizontally, or would they go vertically? That was my life: horizontal or vertical? Then I saw him make that motion — incomplete pass — and I knew we were there.”
Better times, indeed.