Since I last posted, I've been wondering whether the Steelers are the team to beat the Patriots. On Monday Night Football, provided that you could sit through the forced banter between the three hosts who have no business working with each other and stomach Tony Kornheiser desperately failing to channel Howard Cosel and/or be funny, you'd have seen a team look just about as good as a team can. But it was against the wreckage of the Baltimore Ravens.

The Patriots are slightly better than the Ravens offensively, in the same way that eating Thanksgiving dinner is slightly better than getting kicked in the shins a half dozen times. But the Steelers, more than any of the teams the Pats have played to this point, have all the pieces on defense to give stopping this juggernaut the old college try. Having the pieces and bringing them to the game and having them work the way the coaches drew it up isn't as easy as one could hope, though.

No matter how good they are, the Steelers cornerbacks are all considerably shorter than Randy Moss. And with Moss getting away with offensive pass interference the way no one on this Earth has since Michael Irvin brought his talents to the broadcast booth, he is a disconcerting prospect. And there is the question of whether or not the Steelers can find a way to stop Wes Welker finding every little hole in every zone. If they can't do that a handful of times, they're not going to get the Pats off the field on third down.

Then there is the zone blitz scheme which Dick Lebeau practically invented. It's greatest strength is its capacity to baffle, confuse and frustrate pass protection schemes and force them to break down while closing off the quarterback's outlets. Unfortunately, you can't do that to Tom Brady and his offensive linemen. As a group, the five linemen and their field general do not possess enough intelligence to be baffled, confused or frustrated. And while there are coaching staffs and teams that can come up with plans to outsmart any opponent, is there a plan to outdumb the morons on the Patriots?

On offense, the Steelers can run the ball, even though they didn't do much of that against Baltimore. Even if the size and strength of the Patriots defensive line leads you to believe that Fast Willie Parker will be contained, don't forget that the Steelers can throw Najeh Davenport at the Pats. Even though he's best remembered for being arrested after an ex-girlfriend awoke to discover him befouling her closet in the middle of the night, he still has the potential to run all over the Patriots like Marion Barber did in Dallas.

Pass protection could be a problem, since Mike Vrabel seems to have borrowed Rodney Harrison's fountain of youth. And Big Ben loves to hang on to the ball, even though he moves well in the pocket and shrugs off defenders because of his size and strength, this could hurt the Steelers. If he makes even one mistake when it comes to ball security, that could provide the Patriots with the opportunity to take a lead which no sign seen to date points to them relinquishing.

One thing this secondary for the Pats has yet to face is a deep threat like Santonio Holmes. If the Steelers can protect Big Ben, this could burn the Pats badly. Then again, if any of the ifs I have brought up to this point in the season had amounted to anything more than a small colossal waste of time in this giant colossal waste of time that is this blog, the damn Patriots wouldn't be undefeated and I'd look like less of a tool.

Speaking of tools, it provides an inelegant segue into a group of people who badly need criticism. NBC is saving the environment, whether we like it or not. I was reluctant to blog about this a few days ago, because I expected the Bush Administration to have a change of heart along the lines of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol when Matt Lauer went to Greenland to break the story of global warming, but I was disappointed.

While NBC is making hypocritical gestures like sending a waste of space to Greenland to waste even more time and space than he usually wastes and shutting off a few lights in its studio, a serious question is going unanswered. NBC wants me to be conscious of my carbon footprint (and as a subsidiary of GE, the network is far less a threat to the general environmental health of the planet than a guy who doesn't even own an automobile, right?), but did they really need to send one of their talking heads to Greenland to do it?

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm assuming that Matt Lauer didn't row himself up to Greenland in a boat. So he must have taken a plane or a boat to Greenland. And since NBC probably didn't buy him and whatever personnel were required to support him and his crew tickets on a Southwest Airlines flight to the middle of nowhere in Greenland, some genius must have chartered a plane or a ship to move those people and their equipment to Greenland, unless of course the natives there have all the necessary equipment for broadcasting "news" across the globe.

So NBC spent how much money, transported how many people and how much equipment to Greenland to get me and a few million other people to think about their impact on fragile ecosystems? It seems like that could have been done more efficiently. What with the fact that these people (unless Matt Lauer can provide heat, shelter, food fresh drinking water and whatever other necessities a film crew in the middle of nowhere Greenland require with the powers of his mind) must have done some damage to the pristine ecosystem they visited, how much do I have to scale back my carbon footprint to offset what they did while they went up there to tell me to scale back my carbon footprint in the first place? Good job NBC.

I must apologize for not posting in the last few days. I've been feeling a little depressed, what with Notre Dame collapsing against Georgia Tech and the Red Sox temporarily returning to form after the sweep at the hands of the Yankees. I had been looking forward to this evening and the beginning of the NFL regular season, but then I guess I'm too much of an optimist for my own good.

First, I must confess, I now spend about 2 minutes a day looking forward to a time when America can experience an important event in the realm of popular culture without the immortal John Cougar Mellencamp. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe his music did somehow improve as though by magic because his politics are acceptable to a large enough segment of the populace. Perhaps I ought to give up my reluctance to discuss political issues in this blog and embrace an anti Bush stand in this space.

I don't know if I heard things properly, between the waste of time that was the concert and the disappointment I felt as they unfurled the Indianapolis Colts World Champions banner. But I could swear that I caught the strains of "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who. Now I enjoy the song as much as the next person, I just think people ought to choose songs more carefully. It will serve the Colts right if the song jinxes their campaign to defend that championship.

Tonight has also made it clear that I have to spend more time and more space ripping the NBC studio show for its dreadful NFL coverage. Even tonight, with an understrength booth and a show mercifully shortened for the affront against good taste that was the concert, the show managed to fall short of mediocrity by a wide margin. It seems like every personality and every segment the producers add takes things away from the table with an almost mystical capability to make bad worse.

Keith Olberman is now back into sports broadcasting in a very small way. He has adapted his Worst Person in the World segment from his show no one watches on MSNBC to the context of the NFL. So every time we tune in to the NFL on NBC we will be subjected to Keith Olberman's version of the Worst Person in the NFL. I guess it could be worse, we could have the "Cris Collinsworth Introspective on How to Bear up Under the Strain of Being the World's Biggest Douche" segment.

Tonight, Keith Olberman pronounced himself the Worst Person in the NFL. Interestingly, I had considered using that as a joke because I assumed that he would pronounce some other deserving tool as the worst person in the NFL. I was going to dismiss the notion out of hand because Olberman really isn't in the NFL. He is only tangentially connected to the NFL. Apparently his ego didn't see it that way.

I think it would be nice if some concerned soul in Olberman's inner circle could take ten or so seconds to point one salient fact to the anchor. Just as Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, Keith Olberman left whatever small glimmer of relevance and legitimacy he had behind when he left ESPN. Maybe Keith is so insulated in his own ego that he hasn't noticed that his subsequent career ventures haven't exactly been unbridled successes, or even bridled successes (if such a thing exists).

I don't want to give the impression that I am one of the legion of tools who rhapsodize about the Olberman-Patrick era of Sportscenter the way Donovan sang about Atlantis. I'll leave that to Bill Simmons and his disciples. I thought they were adequate, very average. They told me what the out of town scores were, but I could have done without the affected, cynical ennui repartee they used to charm the masses. Maybe if I were the sort of person who cared more about the personalities behind the curtain, I would have gone into mourning, but that's just not who I am.

I might be wrong in this, it's not something that I cared enough about to research. But I blame the Olberman-Patrick era of Sportscenter for the abomination that was the Aaron Sorkin show Sportsnight. Even though the world was crying out for a vision of what a sports highlight show produced by hipsters for hipsters, I think the world would not be a better place if it were still on the air. Nor would much have been lost if it had never seen the light of day.

All that on the NFL on NBC, and we haven't even mentioned Tiki Barber's latest cloying, attention seeking cry for help. As I may have mentioned, I don't like Tiki Barber. Nor do I like Tom Coughlin. As much as I like seeing Coughlin criticized, I don't like to see ungrateful frauds reposition themselves via revisionist history.

It seems almost universally conceded that Tom Coughlin is not a very cool guy. Most people don't like playing football for him. However, there is a substantial body of empirical evidence to show that he had a profound effect for the better on Tiki Barber's career. Before Coughlin came to the Giants, Tiki was an inveterate fumbler. It was his trade mark.

Under Coughlin's reign of terror, whatever else might have happened, Tiki fumbled quite a bit less than he did previously. I don't know how much of that was directly due to Coughlin's intervention, but it doesn't seem like a simple coincidence. No matter how you look at it, Tiki was not mentioned as any kind of Hall of Fame candidate in the Jim Fassel era. It was only in the Coughlin era that Tiki blossomed into a very, very, very marginal candidate for the Hall of Fame.

We all could have done without Tiki Barber's memoirs. We all could have done without Tiki Barber bashing Tom Coughlin for triggering his early retirement. FOr my part, I have believed that Tiki's retirement was a calculated ploy. Not just a career change to the lucrative and far less physically demanding world of the TV journalist, but his only shot at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

His numbers were good, but not really great. His early fumble troubles were always going to haunt him. He never really excelled in the postseason. The only way he'd get in to Canton is if he had a mystique attached to his name, like Lynn Swann with his amazing postseason performances trumping subpar regular season numbers or Gayle Sayers with his impressive highlights and lamentable injury history killing a promising career. So walking away before his perceived time was the only way for Tiki to become a Hall of Famer. Too bad for him this negative notoriety is murdering that slim chance as we speak.

In other news, a game was played and, alas, the Colts won. So much for the Saints as a Super Bowl contender. I was impressed by their run last year. I never thought they could duplicate it, though. First, their schedule is a lot harder. And they had a lot of breaks go their way, and I don't see it happening a second time. The blocked punt TD against Atlanta in their Monday Night home opener last year was a big catalyst for the magic season. That atmosphere will not be replicated, though.

I stil hate Peyton Manning. I do applaud Sprint. In their new commercial series, they have stumbled on something I believed to be as rare as a Jurassic Era remnant still walking the earth - Peyton Manning's mind. Between the Manning omnipresence in every commercial under the sun and the teethmarks John Mellencamp will leave on this reincarnated fame he enjoys when it too disappears, I foresee dark times for Sedition in Red Sox Nation.

I'm sorry I haven't been more consistent with my posts lately. It's been a little hard to find material to blog about with the recent winning streak, especially with the way the Red Sox destroyed the White Sox as the swept the four game set this weekend. My personal life isn't interesting enough to merit a post, in fact, it's boring enough to do more damage to my traffic than this week of silence has done.

I don't really want to post too much about the NFL at the moment because there isn't a lot to say about preseason. I am psyched that the season is right around the corner now. Yes, players can get hurt and teams don't pay players anywhere near regular season salaries so owners make lots of money and sell fans an inferior product. The CHB covered that to death in his recent column on the topic, which was basically the same lame premise he does to death every August.

I like watching the guys who are fighting for their football lives battle in the last minutes of these preseason games. Yeah, it's not the same quality as a regular season game, but it can take on a desperate intensity that makes the games worth watching, at least when the games come up against reruns or even the latest run of terrible original programming on the Turner family of networks.

And as for the risk players take, no one has yet come up with a reasonable alternative to get players some game experience before the regular season opens. Practices and scrimmages are important tools to get teams ready, but players need to face other teams in front of the crowd even if it is only for a few series. But I'm not interested in the future prospects of Kevin Kolb to write a full post about it.

One thing I've noticed that bothers me as I've watched the preseason games is the NBC studio show. If you've read this space regularly, you probably noticed that I hate Cris Collinsworth. And I hate Bob Costas. And I hate Tiki Barber. Put them all together and it's a very, very bad thing. It's even starting to make me slightly dislike Jerome Bettis, who should be immune as a Notre Dame player who submitted a huge performance in a bowl victory.

It seems to me that the folks who run the NBC studio show have made a decision on the way they want their broadcast to work. They seem hell bent on manufacturing controversy so that they have something to talk about. They want to be the edgy show. So they aired Tiki Barber's criticism of Eli Manning's leadership. Tonight, they brought up things from Jerome Bettis' memoirs that might cause contention with his former team.

This bothered me on a number of levels. First, Bettis has been retired for over a year. He's old news. Then, who even knew he wrote a book? He's Jerome Bettis, not Albert Schweitzer. It's good that he wrote the book. It's good that he might be a positive role model for other people. But I don't think the book jumped off the shelves. If his book had any merits as a tell-all tome, it probably would have generated more impact without this little forum discussion.

I've come to believe that these guys are becoming a sort of male version of the View. They don't bring any new insights to the table. They waste time that could be devoted to showing more highlights that we probably already saw ten times. They try to start problems that don't need to be started so that they have something to talk about to justify their existence.

I understand that they have an unenviable time slot from a football news perspective. With ESPN, NFL Network, the web and Direct TV, people have access to scores, highlights, injury updates and anything else under the NFL sun long before the NBC guys take to the air. But there is still a game to be played and some panel must introduce it and provide half-time fodder. So they try to manufacture their own stories and that's beat.

While I'm posting, I have to pass this story on, in case you haven't seen it yet. In Japan, there is a recall on arcade arm wrestling games because they're breaking arms. I find that to be pretty damn funny, but then I'm a bad person. Imagine having to go to the damn emergency room to tell the doctor that an arcade arm wrestling contraption kicked your ass? Provided it happens to some one else, that is not beat. In fact it could be the anti-beat. In fact it's awesome.

I was surprised that there is a mechanical arm wrestling contraption on the market. How bored could you possibly be that you'd want to arm wrestle a machine in the arcade? It's good that these people with too much time on their hands get hurt by the machines they use to occupy their attention for a few seconds. Perhaps I ought to be a bit more sensitive, but personal growth is a long, painful process. Kind of like arm wrestling a Japanese arm wrestling game.