Pittsburgh – The NFL champs are chumps, their mouths bloodied and filled with a taste as acrid as vengeance.
All emotions get rubbed raw in football. And this emotion, although far from pretty, made the Broncos feel so good it was almost sinful.
Here was a score they had been itching to settle for nine months: Denver 31, Pittsburgh 20.
“I ain’t got no sympathy for nobody,” said Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams, grimacing as he gingerly peeled a sweat-soaked shirt over an aching shoulder.
But nothing hurts worse than payback. Did the Steelers know how sick they made a Colorado team and its hometown in January, when they killed Super Bowl dreams in the AFC championship game? They do now.
“I think they’re probably done,” Williams said, inspecting the rubble of Pittsburgh’s 2-6 record, in a stadium where proud Steelers had stood not long ago.
While it remains to be seen if Denver is good enough to win it all, what we learned Sunday was these Broncos are mean enough to instill fear in anybody.
The NFL is brutal business, and nobody had conducted their business more brutally than the Steelers. They take the field with defiance as obvious as the Mount Rushmore jaw of coach Bill Cowher and defy you to start something.
And mess with the champs is exactly what Denver did. The Broncos never backed down, refusing to feel sorry for the embarrassment at the hand of Peyton Manning in a costly loss to Indianapolis a week earlier, getting off the ground as center Tom Nalen did when Pittsburgh linebacker James Farrior kicked him with a cheap shot. When defenders from Ian Gold to Nick Ferguson hobbled off the field, Denver kept fighting.
When Pittsburgh dared receiver Javon Walker to run through a steel curtain, he repeatedly shredded the in-your-face, man-to-man defense, with three touchdowns. Walker accounted for more than 50 percent of the yardage the Broncos gained through the air and personally produced 72 of the 115 yards gained on the ground, in as dominating an offensive performance by a Denver player since the days John Elway wore No. 7.
Walker was acquired by Denver after the 34-17 loss to Pittsburgh in the AFC title game removed any doubt the Broncos were in dire need of a game-breaker. And this was the game when coach Mike Shanahan, whose offense had been bogged down with far too much reliance on the run, finally let Walker strut his stuff.
“I don’t know what he’s on,” teammate Rod Smith said of Walker. “But I want to get on it tonight.”
There will be a temptation to declare Jake Plummer finally has regained the full trust of his coach, and cite his 227 passing yards against Pittsburgh as all the evidence needed to table any discussion of a quarterback controversy until 2007.
The problem with such simplistic logic? Nothing and nobody are safe in the NFL, where if reputations counted for anything, the Steelers already would have been given a free ticket to the playoffs.
“They are the best two-win team I’ve ever played,” Broncos linebacker Al Wilson said, not trying to be a smart-aleck. His point? “The margin for success is very small in this league.”
How does it feel to be the former champs? It stinks, Steelers star Hines Ward said over and over again, although the precise word he employed was too raw for a family newspaper. It’s all over for Pittsburgh except throwing in the Terrible Towel.
Denver owed the Steelers this one.
“To say there’s satisfaction from winning (during the regular season), when they won the Super Bowl, I don’t think you can even compare that,” Shanahan said.
But if revenge was not a motive, it becomes harder to explain why Shanahan sat through at least 30 viewings of the video evidence from the pain Pittsburgh inflicted on Denver when last these two teams met.
“Ultimately, they knocked us from getting our goal. Because, for us, if you don’t win a Super Bowl, your season is a failure,” Williams said.
There’s nothing left now for the Steelers except the taste of failure.
It’s the same taste Denver can cleanse only by winning the Super Bowl.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
