I love my Steelers, always have and always will be. 9-0 has been fantastic, but history doesn’t show it for us. What sticks out like a sore thumb is that we always feel overconfident in ourselves that we forget to accomplish goals that are right in front of us.
In other words, when Steelers are ahead and control our destiny, we stay conservative, focus on the future more than the present, and we fall back; this is called a trap game and it allows the opponent to pick-up the notorious upset. The infamous trap games are a weakness of ours that affects every season we ever played in, and we’re not the only teams that deal with this dilemma, but it bothers me so.
They can derail a season in terms of momentum and decrease our confidence and self-esteem as part of a team. A key statistic about these types of games, they occur later in the season where a division title or a playoff spot is up for grabs, and we would need to work twice as hard to win the games we need later, not that we work hard enough. As a 5-year Football coach and a former player, I know very well how games against weaker opponents can kick us in the rear-end. The Steelers took care of business against Cincinnati, but there’s still Jacksonville this Sunday and Washington on the horizon plus the remaining divisional matchups and key conference games against Buffalo and Indianapolis.
The NFL has had its share where teams were favored by over 14 points, and not only squeak-by or lose the game but for betting sake, they lose the spread. Some games in NFL lore (including Super Bowls) come to mind such as Joe Namath’s guarantee in Super Bowl III where the Baltimore Colts were favored by 18 points, Scott Norwood’s field goal attempt going Wide Right in Super Bowl XXV where the Bills were favored, and the New York Giants stopping the New England Patriots from going undefeated in Super Bowl XLII (had a chance when they met in the last game of the regular season, but fell short). As far as the Steelers go, those can’t be further from the truth as we have had ours too. I can give you hundreds of times the Steelers fell into these types of games, but I’ll give you the three most important that made the most impact just for sake of time, divisional games do not count.