The Steelers have increasingly gotten better on defense as this season has progressed, a big reason for their nine-game winning streak.
But it isn't just the defense. The offense has featured a heavy dose of Le'Veon Bell, and he has emerged as one of the best players in the NFL.
They are on a roll, but today they will face their biggest challenge of the season when they play the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium in the AFC championship.
The Patriots have pedigree, perhaps the best coach in the NFL, an excellent defense and usually feature excellent special teams. They also, of course, have Tom Brady.
And they have all that "extra stuff," too, and it can't be overlooked as a part of their story.
Player for player, I think, the Steelers are the better, more balanced team. And I don't believe it's Bill Belichick and Brady that should have the Steelers worried about today's game.
It is all that extra stuff that seems to mysteriously follow the Patriots before and during big games that will be hard for the Steelers to account for. Heck, it might turn out that stuff is the X-factor that evens the playing field and gives the Patriots the edge they need.
You might have your mind in the gutter about the Patriots, and Mike Tomlin obviously does based on his post-game comments from the locker room in Kansas City, but I don't.
Let's presume this will be a very un-Patriots-like AFC title game, and it will be played pretty much straight up. If that's the case, the best team will win.
That requires us to believe there won't be any equipment guys sneaking footballs into the bathroom to deflate them for Brady.
It also requires us to believe there weren't hidden cameras filming practices in the Steelers South Side facility this week or that there weren't cameras hidden in the Heinz Field press box filming signals during the first meeting between these two teams.
And it requires us to believe that there won't be some mysteriously timed malfunctions in the headsets the Steelers coaches use to communicate.
And let's not forget those funky formations from a 2015 playoff game between the Ravens and Patriots that caused John Harbaugh to lose his mind. It turns out the formations were (barely) legal, but we all know they violated the spirit of the rules and thus "formationgate" is very real.
Again, though, I believe this is a kinder, gentler Patriots team and one that has turned over a new leaf, so none of that should come into play.
I believe the Patriots have learned from all of their fines, suspensions and lost draft pick. And that's why I'm going to pick this game under the assumption that it will be played fair and square and without Belichick finding a way to put his finger on the scale to try and tip it his way.
On the surface, one could look at the record of the Patriots (15-2) and the Steelers (13-5) and say the Patriots are better, but that's short-sighted, because this Steelers team is much different than the one that stumbled its way to a 4-5 record to start the year.
The Steelers defense has gotten much better and mostly because the personnel has gotten much better. Tomlin and Keith Butler scrapped the rotating outside linebacker mess once Bud Dupree got healthy and installed him as a starter on one side and James Harrison as the starter on the other.
Ryan Shazier got and stayed healthy, and the three rookies -- Sean Davis, Javon Hargrave and Artie Burns -- all got better as they gained experience.
That's why during the Steelers' nine-game winning streak, they have the most sacks (31) of anyone in the NFL over that time, and it is why the Dolphins and Chiefs combined to score only 28 points against them in the first two playoff games.
Bell is on a roll and has run wild over the Steelers' first two playoff opponents, and Roethlisberger is due to have a really good game after laying a bit of an egg in Kansas City.
Brady and the Patriots are on a different level than those two teams, but he is without his biggest weapon in tight end Rob Gronkowski. That's a big loss, especially in the red zone, and the Patriots are only 3-3 in playoff games he has missed.
That tells me they are fairly ordinary without Gronkowski. With that said, and assuming there's no "extra stuff," I'm going with the Steelers, 27-23.
Sports on 01/22/2017