Bill Cowher and the Steelers’ Return to the Top

The surprise retirement of Chuck Noll came at a critical juncture for the Steelers. The sheen from the four Super Bowl titles in the 1970s had faded, and from 1980 to 1991 the Steelers won just two division titles and did not advance past the divisional round of the playoffs.

The Steelers’ search for Noll’s successor led them no further than their backyard in one sense. They hired Bill Cowher, who had grown up in nearby Crafton and at age 34 became the youngest head coach in the NFL.

Cowher coached like he had played as a special-teamer with the Browns and Eagles: intense and all over the place like the spittle that sometimes flew from his mouth. He wore his emotions as if they were a part of his wardrobe, and with a chin that looked like it had been forged in a Pittsburgh steel mill he proved to be a perfect fit for the Steelers.

“We had one-on-one drills in practice and he was getting fired up and he was out there running sprints with us,” recalled former Steelers center Dermontti Dawson, who played four seasons for Noll before Cowher took over as head coach. “He was right in the mix with everything we did as players and it was more interactive, a total contrast.”

Tunch Ilkin, the Steelers’ starting left tackle when Cowher was hired, had played against Cowher and was the same age as his new coach. Ilkin loved playing for Noll but he quickly embraced Cowher too because of the contrast.

“He wasn’t trying to be like Chuck or anybody else. He was just himself. I think that’s why it worked,” Ilkin said. “Bill was a terrific coach and I thought that was great that he wasn’t influenced by that. I thought it was really great that when Chuck retired he kind of stepped back and he wasn’t sticking around to be a help. He allowed that transition to go smoothly.”

It went better than that.

Cowher joined Paul Brown as the only NFL coaches to lead a team to the playoffs in their first six seasons. The Steelers returned to the Super Bowl in 1995 and played in three AFC Championship Games from 1994 to ’97.

They weathered some lean seasons under Cowher but in 2004 the Steelers won 15 consecutive games with rookie Ben Roethlisberger playing quarterback after losing their season opener.

The season, however, ended with a crushing loss to the Patriots at Heinz Field, dropping the Steelers to 1–4 in AFC Championship games under Cowher.

The next season the Steelers won seven of their first nine games but then dropped three in a row to fall to 7–5 heading into the final month of the regular season. With little to no room for error the Steelers reeled off four consecutive wins.

Jerome Bettis punctuated the first of those victories by running over Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher in a 21–9 win at snowy Heinz Field. That play served as a fitting metaphor for the rest of the regular season as the Steelers trampled their final four opponents by a combined score of 115–33.

If it seemed like they were sailing that wasn’t an accident. Cowher started a theme with his players when it looked like they might miss the playoffs, telling them to imagine they were on the water with nothing else around to distract them.

“The basic scene was the same,” former Steelers guard Alan Faneca said. “We were on a ship for six weeks and were hearing stories about us on a ship for 20 to 30 minutes of this team meeting and he would weave it around football terms to us and what was happening that week and things to do on a ship. It’s you and the sea and nothing else and you don’t worry about anything else.”

The Steelers rode that message to NFL history.

They prevailed four times in the postseason, becoming the first No. 6 seed to win the Super Bowl. Their 21–10 victory over the Seahawks in Super Bowl XL wasn’t a Picasso but it gave Bettis, whose teammates so badly wanted to win him a ring before he retired, the perfect ending to his career.

It added the missing piece needed to bridge the current teams with the ones that had won four Super Bowls in the 1970s. The victory also validated Cowher, a master motivator who had been at his best in leading the Steelers to their first world championship in 25 seasons.

“I tell people today one of the best things he did as a coach was every single week he put a mission in front of us and had the team focused for the rest of the week on that one mission, whatever it was he thought we needed to do to for that week to beat that opponent,” Faneca said of Cowher, who resigned after the 2006 season and has since worked as a studio analyst for CBS. “He did that week in and week out and sometimes it wasn’t much and sometimes it was a lot. But when you left that first team meeting on Wednesday morning, everybody was working toward the same goal and it got everybody going towards the game.”

EXTRA POINTS

The Longest Run

Speed, scheme, and exquisite execution resulted in the touchdown run that helped the Steelers win their fifth Super Bowl. “Fast” Willie Parker broke off a 75-yard run on the second play of the third quarter after flashing through a huge hole at Ford Field. Guard Kendall Simmons and tackle Max Starks crashed in the right side of the line and guard Alan Faneca wiped out Seahawks linebacker Lofa Tatupu after pulling from the left.

Parker scored easily on the run that remains the longest in Super Bowl history. The Steelers had noticed that the Seahawks shifted their defense to the left when they anticipated a pass to the left side of the field. When the Steelers, leading 6–3, got the look they wanted quarterback Ben Roethlisberger changed the play from a pass to 34 Counter Pike. Parker’s burst gave them a double-digit lead on the way to a 21–10 victory. “We were setting up that run the whole game,” Faneca said.