Terry Bradshaw threw a career-high 28 touchdown passes on a team that lost only twice all season by a combined 10 points. The defense — arguably the best of all time — outsacked the opposition nearly 2-1.
Loaded with future Hall of Famers, the Steelers defeated a mirror-image opponent in the Super Bowl that almost has a wing of its own in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, becoming the first team to beat a reigning Super Bowl champion in the NFL title game.
For at least one more week, the Steelers remain the only team to produce six Super Bowl winners — the 49ers could tie them next week — but it is their 1978 squad that stands above the others.
That 1978 team, which started the season with a seven-game winning streak, finished 14-2 and seemingly had a future Hall of Famer at every other position, was voted as the super team of those six Steelers Super Bowl winners by a panel of national and local journalists assembled by the Tribune-Review.
The 15-member panel includes four members of the writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame and has a combined 522 seasons of NFL coverage. The panelists were given no criteria other than to rank the six in the order they deemed appropriate.
While Steelers fans have debated for years which team was superior, the voting for the top spot wasn’t that close.
The ’78 Steelers, who rebounded from the worst season of the Super Bowl run (a 9-5 record in 1977) to win the first of successive NFL titles, received nine of the 15 first-place votes. Only the ’75 Steelers, who also beat the Cowboys in the Super Bowl, received more than one first-place vote; they earned four.
The 1979 and ’74 teams received the other two first-place votes.
The ’75 team earned 12 first- or second-place votes and easily finished as the runner-up. The 1979 team that easily had the most quality wins of any of the four ’70s-era Super Bowl champs nosed out for third place the groundbreaking ’74 team that won with Franco Harris’ rushing and an in-its-infancy Steel Curtain defense.
The 2008 team that needed a last-minute Santonio Holmes TD catch to beat Arizona in the Super Bowl was fifth; the ’05 team that won its final eight games after starting 7-5 was sixth.
Why the 1978 team?
It wasn’t Bradshaw’s best season (1979 was) and Harris’ 3.5 yards-per-carry average was his lowest of the 1970s. But the defense held exactly half of its opponents to 10 points or fewer, with seven scoring in single digits, and John Stallworth (11) and Lynn Swann (9) caught a combined 20 of Bradshaw’s 28 touchdown passes.
And the unsung defensive star? None other than current NBC NFL analyst Tony Dungy, who didn’t start at defensive back yet had a team-high six interceptions and two fumble recoveries.
“The reason I think our team was so great was we won two Super Bowls with the same personnel before the passing rule change (the ‘Mel Blount rule’ that reduced the amount of contact between defensive backs and receivers) and after the passing rule change,” Harris said. “That says a lot.”
Each of the six Super Bowl winners could make a case for being the best of the best.
The 1975 team survived the most grueling division race in team history — the Steelers went 12-2, the Bengals 11-3, the Oilers 10-4 — to reach the playoffs with a lineup that featured 11 Pro Bowl players. There, they had to beat the team that won the Super Bowl the following season (the Raiders) and the team that would win it the season after that (the Cowboys) to repeat as Super Bowl winners.
The 1979 team that trailed the 9-7 Rams entering the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl is often regarded as a long-past-its-prime group that persevered to win the franchise’s fourth and final title of the decade.
In fact, that team — except for a 35-7 blowout loss at San Diego — was dominant all season, beating five teams with double-digit wins (the Oilers, Broncos, Cowboys, Redskins and Dolphins) and its three playoff opponents by an average of 15 points.
The 1974 team that won the first league title in Steelers history was blessed with an easy schedule; there wasn’t a single regular-season win over an opponent with a winning record. But its AFC title game win over Oakland was arguably the best postseason victory in franchise history outside a Super Bowl.
The 2005 team became the first to win a Super Bowl without playing a home playoff game. And the 2008 team’s schedule was the most difficult of any Super Bowl winner.
Multiple panel members mentioned the 1976 Steelers that won 10 consecutive games with the greatest defensive stand in NFL history — only 28 points allowed in the final nine regular-season games — would have rated highly had they won the Super Bowl. But that team was ruined by injuries before it could get to the title game.
Read more: http://triblive.com/sports/steelers/3358755-74/team-bowl-super#ixzz2JBUSqMel
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