DETROIT – Losers of three straight, the Steelers were in more than trouble back in early December. They were 7-5 and the next loss might remove them from the playoff picture entirely.
“We had no margin for error,” coach Bill Cowher said.
Desperate times call for desperate actions and Cowher reached deeply into his motivational bag of tricks to find a solution. What he came up with was something of a fractured fairy tale. He told his team the story of Christopher Columbus, of an explorer who chose to sail into the unknown.
That is what we must be, Cowher said, but along the way the message got tangled and mangled but somehow achieved the desired effect.
“The Christopher Columbus thing, I kind of thought it up,” Cowher said yesterday morning, gladly posing with the Vince Lombardi Trophy barely 10 hours after the Steelers beat the Seahawks 21-10 in Super Bowl XL. “I think it’s a great analogy, I screwed up some of the details. I know he discovered the West Indies, it wasn’t America, I said periscope one time instead of saying telescope, they thought it was a submarine.
“The whole thing with Columbus, and I mean this sincerely, when he got on the ship, I wasn’t back there, I can only imagine what was being said to this man, he took off sailing and they said ‘Don’t go there, because the world’s flat, you keep going in that water it’s going to drop off.’ He kept going, not knowing what was ahead of him, uncharted waters, but he found land. My point very simply, we were entering uncharted water. They said no one could ever make the playoffs, no one’s been able to do this and all of a sudden you get in the playoffs and it’s ‘No six seed has ever gone to a championship game.’ Someone tells you something you’re not supposed to do it, the bottom line, history was not going to dictate our fate, but our effort can make history.
“Maybe it was a little bit of a stretch with Columbus, but they kind of enjoyed that analogy.”
The Steelers set sail on an eight game-winning streak, winning the final four in the regular season and four more in the postseason.
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If a replay challenge had reversed Ben Roethlisberger’s 1-yard touchdown run in the second quarter, Cowher said the Steelers, trailing 3-0, would have eschewed the chip-shot field goal and gone for the end zone on fourth down.
“It was less than a yard and you know what, if we don’t get it in, we get the ball at the start of the second half,” Cowher said.
“It was just a question of what play we were going to call.”