Rivalries Outside the AFC North
Yesteryear
The precursor to the contentiousness and competitiveness of Steelers-Ravens unfolded in the 1970s—and specifically when the Steelers made their move.
Pittsburgh and Oakland played 11 times from 1970 to ’77, with the Raiders winning six of those games. Five of those meetings took place in the postseason, three from 1974–76. All three times the team that emerged from those games also won the Super Bowl.
The rivalry, meanwhile, became so nasty that it ended up in a courtroom.
Raiders safety George Atkinson sued Chuck Noll for defamation after the Steelers coach said the NFL needed to get rid of the “criminal element” following a 1976 game in which an Atkinson hit away from the play left wide receiver Lynn Swann with a concussion.
Atkinson lost the case but nothing better epitomized the raw feelings between the AFC powers, and all of that could be traced to December 23, 1972.
That is the day the Steelers won the first playoff game in franchise history—on the play that has turned into the sports equivalent of the Zapruder film. What is known as the “Immaculate Reception” to Steelers fans is still called the “Immaculate Deception” by former Raiders linebacker Phil Villapiano.
At the crux of the dispute is whether Steelers running back Frenchy Fuqua or Raiders safety Jack Tatum touched the ball first, right before it ricocheted back to Franco Harris. Harris’ shoestring grab and subsequent 60-yard touchdown reception delivered a 13–7 win, and feelings after that game were so hard that it strained at least one friendship.
Fuqua and Raiders tight end Raymond Chester, former teammates at Morgan State, had been close friends prior to the most famous play in NFL history. They stopped talking that day and the incommunicado lasted for years.
A significant thaw between players on each side occurred around 2004, Fuqua said, at an NFL golf outing in Nashville, Tennessee.
There were 12 players, he said, from that game at the outing, including Tatum and Chester. Both sides started arguing almost immediately about the play and the conversations led to a detour.
“We all ended up at a bar and none of us showed up to the golf outing the next day,” Fuqua said with a laugh. “I have not been invited to that tournament since but we really talked.”
His conversations with Tatum, who passed away in 2010, continued and they even appeared at some banquets together. The two, Fuqua said, made peace with one another as well as the play.
“We both exchanged versions to each other,” Fuqua said. “He said he didn’t know what happened. All he knew is that he was trying to tear my head off. I said, ‘Well, we’re going to keep it that no one knows. I’ll never tell.’”
Fuqua and Chester, meanwhile, stay in touch and occasionally talk on the phone. Of course, they still argue about the legality of Harris’ touchdown, but more in fun now.
“I think that hate—since all of us have become senior citizens—has faded a little bit,” Fuqua said, “and it’s just a story now.”
Frenchy Fuqua poses with the towel that articulates his stance on the mystery of the “Immaculate Reception.” (Photo courtesy of Frenchy Fuqua)
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A rivalry that once ranked up there with any of them for the Steelers had the air taken out of it by forces beyond their control.
In 2002, the NFL broke up the six-team AFC Central, taking the Tennessee Titans and Jacksonville Jaguars out of the division and moving them to the newly created AFC South.
Black and Gold fans coming of age now look at the Titans as just another team, but the Steelers have a long history with that organization.
The Titans had been the Houston Oilers before moving to Nashville in 1997, and the Steelers beat the Oilers in back-to-back AFC Championship Games en route to the final two Super Bowls of the 1970s.
Chuck Noll’s last playoff win came against the Oilers and it cemented 1989 as one of his best coaching jobs while costing Jerry Glanville his job. The Steelers started that season 0–2 and lost to the Browns and Bengals by a combined score of 92–10.
Noll stayed the course and the Steelers won nine of their last 14 games to qualify for the postseason. They weren’t given much chance to win in Houston’s “House of Pain,” but the Steelers took the Oilers into overtime.
Rod Woodson forced a fumble that gave the Steelers excellent field position but they couldn’t move the ball and Noll opted to punt rather than try a long field call. Defensive coordinator Rod Rust, however, told Noll that he didn’t think his gassed defense could hold off the Oilers if they got the ball again. Noll took a timeout and then sent Gary Anderson to attempt a 51-yard field goal.
Anderson made it, giving the Steelers a 26–23 win and Noll no small measure of satisfaction. A couple of years earlier he had scolded Glanville during a post-game handshake for what he considered dirty play by the Oilers.
That started a feud between the coaches that carried over to the players. After the Steelers upset the Oilers in the wild-card round of the playoffs, offensive tackle Tunch Ilkin, who never talked trash, could not resist letting his opponents hear about it.
“How’s the pain, baby?” a pumped Ilkin shouted after Anderson’s field goal quieted the Astrodome crowd. “How bad does it hurt now?”
Alas for the Steelers, the Oilers handed them a painful loss after the organization had relocated and become the Titans.
The Titans won a crazy game that had a little bit of everything, including a controversial finish. The Steelers fell behind 14–0 but then scored 20 unanswered points. The back-and-forth game went into overtime, where Joe Nedney kicked field goals three different times before one counted and gave the Titans a 34–31 win.
Nedney’s 31-yard field goal attempt split the uprights but it didn’t count because the Steelers called timeout before the snap. He missed his next kick but it didn’t count after Dewayne Washington was flagged for running into Nedney.
Nedney drilled the 26-yard mulligan he received, giving the Oilers/Titans their only playoff win over the Steelers.
Present
Go to a sports bar that has a lot of Steelers fans in it when the Patriots are playing and it takes mere minutes to experience the general dislike to visceral hatred of New England. This really struck me a week after the Steelers’ heartbreaking loss at Denver in the 2015 AFC playoffs. The Patriots were playing the Broncos and the crowd at a Pittsburgh-area Primanti Brothers where I watched the AFC Championship Game went nuts any time the team that had eliminated the Steelers did something good. Even more telling: All it took was an extended shot of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady on the TV screens for calls of “Whiner!” or “Cheater!” to echo throughout the bar.
The Patriots are easily the Steelers’ most despised rival outside of the AFC North, and a lot of that is rooted in New England owning Pittsburgh since Brady and coach Bill Belichick started winning Super Bowls together in the 2000s.
The Patriots are 8–3 against the Steelers since Brady’s emergence, including 2–0 in the AFC Championship Game.
The Patriots drilled the Steelers in 2007 after safety Anthony Smith’s infamous guarantee that Pittsburgh would hand New England its first loss of the season. Brady again strafed the Steelers in 2013, throwing for 432 yards and four touchdowns in the Patriots’ 55–31 romp in Foxboro.
The Steelers have beaten Brady just twice in 10 games against him from 2001 to 2015, and Black and Gold fans are as put off by how the Patriots have won as much as they are by how frequently they have won. I suppose this makes them like a lot of fans in NFL cities across the country.
The Patriots’ four Super Bowl titles since 2000 have come under a cloud of suspicion since New England has continually shown it will do anything to gain an edge. The team has been punished by the NFL for illegally taping opponents and deflating footballs in the 2014 AFC Championship Game.
Some Steelers players have publicly questioned whether the Patriots knew what offensive plays they were running in the 2004 AFC Championship Game. And as recently as 2015 the Steelers said there were headset communications issues in a 28–21 loss at Gillette Stadium.
My take? Belichick is on a very short list of the greatest football coaches of all time and Brady might be the greatest quarterback of all time. The best analogy I heard after the Deflategate controversy is that Belichick is the smartest kid in class who still feels the need to write the answers to a test on his arm.
The perception of the Patriots as cheaters is fair, but show me a team that doesn’t try to gain an advantage. New England has simply stretched those bounds more than any team since becoming the first organization to win four Super Bowls with the same head coach and quarterback since the Steelers with Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw.
The good news for the Steelers: the window is starting to close on Brady’s career. The bad news for the Steelers: they are running out of time to saddle Belichick and Brady with the losses that would make the rivalry less one-sided in this century.