Gene Collier: Cowher's Excellence Overlooked

Collier: With all the hype over Patriots' Belichick, Cowher's excellence overlooked
Thursday, January 20, 2005
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Steelers practiced and studied yesterday, laughed and joked, ate, slept, scratched themselves, played video games and generally did everything they usually do on a Wednesday; it was almost as if they don't know that come Sunday, they're doomed to be swallowed by the cavernous brain gap that presumably exists between Bill Belichick and Bill Cowher.

As of this morning, the AFC championship game between Belichick's New England Patriots and Cowher's Steelers was still on, even as the nation's football pundits cultivated this notion that Cowher and his staff are trapped in some delusional exercise in mental futility.

ESPN's fact-or-friction gasbag Sean Salisbury, for example, weighed in with the edict that Belichick might be considered the greatest coach of all time should his Patriots win this weekend and again in Super Bowl 39. That would carry a little more import were it not from the same intellect that brought you such pregame insights as "you're gonna have to score in that game to win it."

Not to be critical.

In the first place, any discussion of genius this week should recognize that, so far, there is no Nobel Prize for football. We're talking about Bill Belichick and not, say, Guglielmo Marconi. In the era after the discovery of radio waves, when it was still thought that global communication was impossible because, given the curvature of the earth, radio waves would go straight off into the stratosphere, it was Marconi who said, "Not necessarily."

It was Belichick who said, given the curvature of the pig bladder on the long arm of Peyton Manning, "Maybe we should drop eight into coverage and hope for the best."

But in the long media shadow of Manning's dismal effort Sunday in Foxboro, Mass., the circumstantial evidence that Belichick's brain is simply too large for a cum laude speech communications graduate of the University of Tennessee seems to have overwhelmed any designs the Steelers might have on advancing to Jacksonville in New England's stead.

All things being equal, this would be nonsense. But, when you consider that Belichick is 1-1 against Cowher in the postseason and 3-7 against him in the regular season, or if you remember that when it looked like no one would beat Belichick again -- when he'd won a record 21 games in a row -- it was Cowher's team that spanked him Oct. 31 by two touchdowns, and it wasn't that close.

You have to wonder just a bit about the hype vacuum in which there don't seem to be any stories or commentary about how Cowher has Belichick's number or about how Cowher is to Belichick as Belichick is to Manning.

Or something.

The most diabolically clever thing Belichick did to poor Peyton last week was remembering to issue uniforms to Tedy Bruschi, Willie McGinest, and Mike Vrabel. The remarkable defensive aptitudes of New England's superb linebackers were the raw genius behind that result, and the same entity might dictate the outcome Sunday, but, in whatever eventuality, this AFC title game won't turn on the presumed difference in strategical capability between Belichick and Cowher.

"What are they going to do? We've seen everything," said Steelers defensive line coach John Mitchell. "Everybody runs the same plays from the same formations, there might be a few little wrinkles, but, basically, it'll be the same thing we've seen for 17 weeks. It always comes down to players -- who has more good players on that day."

Mitchell coached with Belichick on the Cleveland Browns' staff of the early 1990s, and, with more than 30 years of experience at all levels of the game, probably has as firm a handle on the impact of coaching intellect as anyone involved in the game Sunday. In his first job, he was eyewitness to the coaching aura of one Paul "Bear" Bryant.

"Everyone feared coach Bryant," Mitchell remembered of opposing coaches. "Every week, they thought he was always about to come up with something new, re-invent the wheel.
"He coached his system and prepared his players, but everyone spent so much time worrying about what he might do, they forgot to coach their teams. That was the edge we had with coach Bryant."

I don't think Cowher is going to forget anything this week. I don't think he's going to forget that Dick LeBeau, not Belichick assistant Romeo Crennel, is coaching the best defense in the league. I don't think he's going to forget that for all the complexities forecast for rookie quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, that New England's pass defense was not rated in the top half of the NFL.

"You look at the stability that a guy like coach Cowher brings," backup quarterback Charlie Batch was saying yesterday. "He's lost coordinators throughout the years and always replaced them with guys who became just as accomplished. And those didn't leave for nothing, but because they were very successful. In that way, coach Cowher has spread coaching excellence through the league, like the [San Francisco] 49ers did."

Buffalo Bills head coach Mike Mularkey, one of Cowher's former offensive coordinators, said this month that Cowher knows more about football than anyone he'd ever come in contact with.

But in a culture that thinks with its eyes, a nation sees Cowher as the screaming, spitting face of the Pittsburgh franchise, and it sees Belichick as the totally non-demonstrative sideline presence who must really be thinking hard because he's not doing much of anything else.

I wonder if Marconi threw the first headset.

(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.)