Jan 21, 2017 4 min read

The Steelers are hot, but Ben Roethlisberger is not.

And it says here that Roethlisberger is the only player who can keep the Steelers out of the Super Bowl. The Steelers wouldn’t be playing in the AFC Championship game without him, but you could almost say they won their two playoff games in spite of him.

Roethlisberger has two touchdown passes and three interceptions in two playoff games. He’s 5-4 in his last nine playoff games with nine touchdown passes and 10 interceptions.

In 19 postseason games, he’s 13-6 with 24 touchdown passes, 22 interception and a very pedestrian 84.7 passer rating.

And, as you know, the Steelers are playing against a team with the greatest quarterback of all time. Listening to some in the media, you get the idea he just might be the greatest professional athlete in North American history. Maybe even the greatest man in North American history.

That quarterback, of course, would be Tom Brady, who hasn’t been able to complete 50 percent of his passes in either of his last two playoff games and has three touchdown passes, four interceptions and a 62.5 passer rating.

So it’s going to come down to which future Hall of Fame quarterback has the best game. How’s that for in-depth analysis?

But it might not be any more complicated than that. The Patriots just aren’t that much better than the Steelers. And they might not be as good. Have you seen their schedule?

They beat the Jets and Dolphins twice and have wins over the 49ers, Browns, Rams, Bengals and Bills.

They played Seattle at home and lost 31-24.

The Steelers’ schedule isn’t too much tougher but they did have to play the Cowboys and the Chiefs.

Both teams have good running backs but nobody is running the ball better than Le’Veon Bell.

The Steelers have been piling up sacks during their nine-game winning streak but Brady throws so many short passes and gets rid of the ball so quickly, it’s hard to sack him.

That doesn’t mean you can’t hit him. The Texans did a good job of pressuring him last week. When he gets bumped, he gets upset.

He takes it very personally.

A couple of early, well placed roughing the passer penalties might not be a bad idea.

No offensive line is playing better than the Steelers’ right now, but it’s a road game and Roethlisberger has had problems on the road. Maybe it’s those silent counts.

The point is this: even though it is the Patriots and even though they’re playing in New England, it’s anybody’s game.

The Steelers have the more dangerous offensive weapons. The only thing that can stop them right now is a bad game – meaning more than one interception – by Roethlisberger.

He’s due for a good one. Steelers 24 New England 21.

Assuming, of course, there’s no cheating.

• Antonio Brown needs to grow up. His Facebook posting of the Steelers locker room celebration in Kansas City last week was something you might expect from a 12-year-old. Brown is 28. He’s been in the NFL for seven seasons. Time to start acting like a grown-up. Mike Tomlin’s embarrassed by what he was caught saying on the postgame speech, but he shouldn’t be. As we learned with the 45th President of the United States, locker room talk is not meant for public consumption and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

What should be embarrassing to Tomlin is that his players appear to have no fear of him. Try to imagine a player in Bill Belichick’s locker room pulling the same stunt.

Or Chuck Noll’s.

• Have you noticed that two of Pittsburgh’s three major professional teams have played in a combined 12 league or conference championship games in the last 12 seasons?

Both play in leagues with a salary cap. The one that doesn’t hasn’t won a playoff series in 38 years.

• Good to see that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens failed to get enough votes for the Hall of Fame. Both deserve to not get what they deserve because they cheated. What seems to be ignored in discussions about baseball juicers and whether they cheated in order to pile up numbers that would get them elected to the Hall of Fame is that they also helped their teams win games by cheating.

The Giants went to a World Series with Bonds and his gigantic head in 2002.

And how is it that Bonds and Clemens get 50 percent of the votes and Sammy Sosa only gets 10? Sosa hit 609 home runs. Did he use more juice?

John Steigerwald writes a weekend column for the Observer-Reporter