Perhaps, given that his team went out and barely beat the struggling Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin should have been more circumspect and restricted himself to Tomlinisms, like “such is life.”
But in a “Sunday Night Football” pregame conversation with Tony Dungy, he dared poke the bear or eat a peach or tempt the fates.
“Man, I’m going to embrace the elephant in the room: It’s going to be fireworks,” he said. “It’s probably going to be part one, and that’s going to be a big game. But probably, if we’re both doing what we’re supposed to do, the second one is really going to be big. And what happens in the first is going to set up the second one, and determine the location in the second one.”
The game will pit the Steelers, currently the top seed in the AFC, against the Patriots, for now the No. 2 seed, on Dec. 17 in Pittsburgh. Which means that’s quite an elephant he’s hugging. But he believes in his guys.
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“Oh, we can win it all. We should win it all. I sense that about the group,” he told Dungy. “In terms of talent, in terms of having enough competition, depth, I think we check all those boxes. But checking the boxes doesn’t run the race.”
The Steelers nearly left one box unchecked Sunday night, when they beat the underdog Packers with a field goal as time ran out. After that near-stumble, he wasn’t backing off, either.
“He asked for non-coachspeak,” Tomlin said of Dungy. “So I was having a conversation with an old friend. You know I’ve got respect for this process. We’ve got a good football team. I’ve got a great deal of confidence in them. Everybody in America knows that’s a big game [Dec. 17], okay? We couldn’t deny that if we wanted to. You guys are going to ask us about it between now and then. So I stand by the statement.”
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Wonder how Bill Belichick feels about fireworks.
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