Feb 17, 2023 4 min read

With the Kansas City having won their second Super Bowl in the past four seasons, you’ll see a lot about how this team or that team needs to emulate the way Kansas City does things to be successful.

The problem with that is, unless you have Patrick Mahomes it’s not going to work.

No disrespect to Kansas City, but the Chiefs’ roster isn’t overwhelming with talent. There are several good, even great players. Every team would love to have Travis Kelce or Chris Jones.

But Mahomes is the thing that puts Kansas City over the edge. He’s the best player in the NFL.

So, unless a plan includes somehow cloning Mahomes, simply copying what the Chiefs do isn’t going to make a team into a contender.

Mahomes is already on his way to replacing recently retired Tom Brady as perhaps the greatest quarterback in NFL history. He’s not there yet, but with another five seasons like his first five, he most certainly could be in that conversation.

• With Ronde Barber being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame last week, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers now have four members of their defense of the early 2000s so honored.

The Steelers of the 1970s have five members of their defense in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The difference? The Steelers won four Super Bowls in six years. The Bucs? They won one Super Bowl, that coming in 2002.

And remember, for a very long time, the Steel Curtain defense had just four members in the Hall of Fame, defensive lineman Joe Greene, linebackers Jack Lambert and Jack Ham and cornerback Mel Blount. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, when safety Donnie Shell was elected by the Senior Committee as part of the expanded Centennial Class, that the Steelers finally got their fifth member of that great defense into the hall.

When you look at those five players and then compare them to the Bucs’ foursome of defensive lineman Warren Sapp, linebacker Derrick Brooks, safety John Lynch and now Barber, Tampa Bay’s group pales in comparison.

Sapp and Brooks were great players. Lynch and Barber were good players. But are they truly Hall-of-Fame worthy? Eh.

If they were, perhaps the Bucs would have won more than one Super Bowl.

To put it another way, when great defenses are talked about, does anyone ever mention the 2002 Bucs as one of those? Not so much.

• John Mitchell’s retirement earlier this week was the end of one of the great coaching careers in football history.

How many coaches can say they worked under four Hall of Fame head coaches – Bear Bryant, Lou Holtz, Bill Belichick and Bill Cowher – and another in Mike Tomlin who is likely to someday be in the Hall of Fame?

Mitchell both played and coached under the legendary Bryant at Alabama, where he was not only the Crimson Tide’s first Black player, but the first Black coach on the staff.

He later served as the first Black defensive coordinator in the SEC when he was named to that position at LSU in 1990.

Mitchell was always under the radar with the Steelers, whom he joined in 1994 after he left Belichick’s staff following the announcement the Browns would be moving from Cleveland to Baltimore.

The Browns’ loss was Pittsburgh’s gain.

• Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training last week.

This is about as exciting a time of year as there will be for the Pirates.

Yes, the team brought back Andrew McCutchen, and maybe he’ll have a positive influence on some of the team’s young players. So, that was a good move.

But that was more about selling some tickets than anything else. Pittsburgh fans love McCutchen and they’ll probably show up to see him – at least early in the season.

How will that play, however, when the team is 20 games under .500? Will they still show up to see McCutchen play?

Now, there are some exciting young players on the roster, Oneil Cruz among them. And the Pirates do seem to be building something. But that building project is not nearly complete. There’s still a lot of work to be done.

For long-suffering Pirates fans, will hope for 2024 or 2025 and a chance to watch McCutchen be enough to draw them to PNC Park in mid-July?

Probably not.