Patriots Thump Steelers. Some Things Never Change

It's a crazy NFL season. Everybody says so. There are no 2006 Colts, no 2007 Patriots and no 2009 Saints. This seems to bother the talking heads quite a bit. I suspect it's because they can't just jump on a bandwagon and stay there. One week the Jets look dominant and the next they look like chumps. One week the Giants look like they've rounded back into 2007 form, and then next week they lay a stinker against the Cowboys (of all teams.)

Every one of the teams that look like contenders have laid at least one huge turd this year. Even the best teams are flawed. It's a crazy, upside-down NFL season, up for grabs for any of a dozen or so teams, but some things never seem to change.

Like the Tom Brady ass-whipping the Steelers. That never seems to change. The Steelers can, when they are on their game, beat 30 other teams in the NFL, but not the Patriots. At least not the Patriots when Brady is under center.

Patriots 39, Steelers 26.

I've seen this movie before. And I hated it the first half-dozen times I suffered through it. Two thumbs down. Way, Way down.

January 27, 2002: Patriots 24, Steelers 17.

September 9, 2002: Patriots 30, Steelers 14. In a game that looked eerily like last night's.

October 31, 2004: Steelers 34, Patriots 20. Yeah, I liked that one. I was hoping we'd see more like that.

January 23, 2005: Patriots 41, Steelers 27. Worse than the 2001 loss? Maybe it's a toss-up. They both sucked.

December 9, 2007: Patriots 34, Steelers 13.

Do I really have to go on? The 2008 game doesn't count because there was no Brady.

There is no NFL team I hate more than Evil Hoodie and his Patriots. This is well documented. Ironically, there is no team that the Steelers lose to like they do the Patriots. Oh, sure, sure, they drop a game to the Colts here and there. And split games with divisional rivals. It's gonna happen. Especially in division.

In hacker speak, Brady just owns them. When he comes to Pittsburgh, he should wear a t-shirt that reads "Because I'm the Daddy. That's why."

QB ratings are really not exact, and require complex logarithms calculate, but while they are not perfect, they do give you some idea of how effective a quarterback has been in a game, in a season, or against a certain team. Brady's played the Steelers six times in his career. The average of all of those six ratings gives him a lifetime QB rating against the Steelers of 106.7. That's really good, people.

A couple of years ago, the Patriots played in a little game against the Giants. No big deal or anything, it was just Super Bowl XLII, so maybe you saw it or heard about it. The Giants toppled the behemoth Patriots and they did it by hitting Brady. Then hitting him some more. They collapsed the pocket and took away a comfortable place for him to plant and throw. And then they hit him some more. It was an veritable instruction manual for beating Tom Brady.

The Steelers didn't hit him last night hardly at all. He could probably wear that game jersey again next week without even laundering it. Brady in a comfortable pocket = death. It's that simple. I don't care who your DB's or linebackers are, but if you give he of the Justin Beiber hair (formerly of the tiny hipster hat) time, he will carve you up like a Thanksgiving turkey. And so he did.

As to last night's mess on the offensive side for the Steelers, there are plenty of reasons for the dysfunction. Heck, most of the starting offensive line has no business starting an NFL game. I'm not sure I've seen a guard have a worse game than Trai Essex did, and except for Hotel Flozell and the magnificent rookie Maurkice Pouncey, they were all taken to the woodshed most of the night. The Steelers never did establish any kind of offensive rhythm and without Hines Ward in there, Pig Ben had no safety blanket in the redzone. (Has there ever been a worse redzone offense than this iteration of the Steelers? Maybe like the Rich Kotite Jets or something, but this is an historically inept team when they get the ball inside the 10.)

So, what does this Patriots mastery over the Steelers mean for right now, today? Is it a blip, just more of the same? The Steelers can beat everybody but Brady, so they can right the ship and hope to not see the Pats in the playoffs? It's possible, right? Right?!

Or, is this loss the tipping point, just the beginning of the another second half swoon like the one we saw last year?

Thoughts on the Return of Pig Ben

Pig Ben returns to the field Sunday after serving his four game suspension for conduct unbecoming a grown up person. The questions swirl around.

What kind of reception will the fans give him?

What does this mean for team chemistry? What kind of reception did his teammates give him?

Will he be sharp? Or play more like Carson Palmer has of late?

I think Pig Ben is going to play lights out, perhaps better than he's ever played heretofore (and it's been a pretty spectacular career already), because athletes, the ones who perform at this level, are mostly driven and myopic and have a unique sense of the world and their place in it.

It makes me wonder about the weirdness of professional sports and the rules of conduct in the inner-inner-sanctum thereof.

The smallest slight is coaxed, nurtured into a dis of monumental proportions. Then, once it has been built up into an epic insult, it is fed off of as motivation. The New England Patriots trotted out the tired old "no respect" saw year after year, even though most people recognized their greatness, even while we, er I, resented it. Lather, rinse, repeat. Michael Jordan used to convince himself that fans, media, and other players had been critical just to get himself even more psyched for games. So the slights don't even have to be real to be used as fuel.

Enter Pig Ben. Since his meeting with Judge Dread, he has been saying and doing all the right things. He's been talking about the fact that he had a lot of growing up to do and he was working on that. He's been talking about his obligation to his teammates and the community. Meanwhile, he's been working out like a lunatic (he looks to be in the best physical condition he's been in since his rookie year) and doing yoga with his mom. Take it for what it's worth and everybody's mileage may vary on his credibility.

Publicly, he has been humble. And humbled. But inside? Inside, I expect that he feels that he has to quiet all the critics, make them -- us -- choke on our words. And the only way to do that is win football games, play better than he's ever played, better than anybody else is playing. Some people, most people, would wither under that kind of scrutiny, pressure and general condemnation. But I expect it will have the exact opposite effect on Pig Ben.

Roethlisberger's BFF Ray Lewis can probably explain it. In January of 2000, Lewis was arrested in the stabbing deaths of two people. Lewis' attorney (also Pig Ben's attorney), arranged for Lewis to testify against the other two defendants and the murder charges against him were dropped, reduced to the charge of obstruction of justice.

Almost a year to the day later, Lewis' Ravens won the Super Bowl, in no small part because of Lewis' play on the field in that game and throughout that season. The guy has had many great seasons, but perhaps none greater than that year. Normal people, after an ordeal like that -- being involved in or at the very least, witnessing two killings, being investigated, indicted, testifying and all that jazz -- would be thrown off our games. We would just be a mess. But not Ray.

Then there's the other example. Evil Hoodie got caught with his hands in the cookie jar, busted red handed while violating a league rule about filming other teams. Evil Hoodie was fined and the team was docked draft picks. The rest of the NFL reveled in the great comeuppance. But like Ray Lewis, rather than be disturbed by the whole kerfuffle, Evil Hoodie was even more defiant, more determined to run roughshod over the league and thumb his nose at the commish. His team rallied around him, ripped off 18 wins in a row, often rolled up the score on opponents in the process. It led Bill Simmons to dub that season "the Eff You Season," a totally accurate term.

The point is, these are not normal people. The things that would throw most of us into months of self-recrimination, doubt and inertia, instead drive them forward to their greatest performances. It's an alternate reality, through the rabbit hole, out the back of the wardrobe and into the NFL.

That quality allows them to be the elite. They are all undeniably great at what they do, and yet, would you want to spend a night on the town with Ray Lewis? Be married to Bill Belichick? Go on a date with Ben Roethlisberger?

It's an upside down world, the one of pro athletes.