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Steelers overlook a Batch of problems at backup quarterback
If the Steelers are going to be a pass-happy team - and it's pretty obvious that they are - nobody should be surprised if the backup quarterback position becomes a lot more important.
It's one thing for someone like Peyton Manning to throw 40 passes in a game. All but one or two of them are going to come from the pocket. If Ben Roethlisberger throws 44 passes in a game, chances are that on at least 25 of them, he's going to be looking for his second and third read while scrambling.
His odds of ending up with a kick in the head come way down.
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You've heard the expression, "Three things can happen when you pass and two of them are bad." That only applies when the pass is actually thrown, but when you try to pass, at least five things can go wrong:
1. Incomplete.
2. Interception.
3. Sack.
4. Clock stops.
5. Quarterback gets kneed in the head.
Remember before the season, when you kept hearing the Steelers have the best backup quarterback in the AFC? That might have been true, but Charlie Batch can no longer be considered a good backup because he gets hurt too much. He missed last season because of an injury and he might not play again this season.
Batch is better than a lot of quarterbacks who are starting in the NFL, but he doesn't do much good if he has one of his extremities in a cast. When the Steelers made the decision to become a pass-first team, they should have taken Batch's apparent brittleness into account and had someone more prepared than Dennis Dixon as their third quarterback.
• Did you happen to catch the latest news on Don Barden?
You remember Barden. He's the guy who was awarded the slots license for Pittsburgh's North Side then, about an hour and a half later, proved that of the three applicants for the license, he was by far the worst choice. His company, Majestic Star Casinos, filed for bankruptcy last week.
It should make you feel good to know that your state taxes, the ones collected by a state that didn't have enough money to pay its employees a few weeks ago, could be used to hire several people, paying them each salaries that were well into six figures. Their job was to award the license to the most deserving applicant.
They picked Barden instead of the group that was most politically connected, Forest Cities, because everybody would have justifiably claimed the fix was in for Isle of Capris, which had promised to build a $300 million arena and give it to the city.
Keep that in mind when you ride by the Consol Energy Arena as it's going up across the street from Mellon Arena. You're paying for it because the people you paid a large chunk of money were totally inept and made a choice that was no better than what could have been made by the first six people in the Harrisburg phone book.
• A recent Internet report apparently has the 200 or 300 real Pirates fans left in Western Pennsylvania pretty riled up. Jayson Stark of ESPN.com reported that small market teams such as the Pirates get about $80 million in revenue before they sell a ticket, which might make fans wonder what Pirates' owner Bob Nutting is doing with all the money that must be left over after he funded what ended up being a $30-something million payroll.
The talk shows and some columnists got a lot of mileage out of it and there were lots of angry e-mails.
Again, they all missed the point.
So what if Nutting is making a profit? Isn't that what businesses are supposed to do? Most of the outrage seems to be over the fact Nutting might be putting money into his pocket instead of the payroll. Stark should know better than anybody that in order to finish in Major League Baseball's final eight, a team probably needs a payroll close to $100 million.
Stark pointed out that every team in the big leagues gets $30 million from the Central Fund, which is national TV and licensing, and small-market teams get somewhere between $10 and $15 million for local TV. Add $35 million in revenue sharing and they each start with around $80 million.
The Yankees receive about $200 million in local TV revenue. The other large market teams get between $50 and $100 million. It's local television revenue that makes the Yankees the Yankees and the Pirates the Pirates.
Nutting is smart enough to know that spending $75 million on payroll still would require a miracle for a division championship. He's smart enough to know that finishing a few games over .500 and in third place isn't going to have any measurable impact on his attendance.
Most important, he's smart enough to know enough fans are dumb enough to buy tickets to see his pathetic excuse for a baseball team and that he can turn a nice profit with a really bad team with a payroll of under $50 million.
John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.
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