Bulletin board material is never something you want to give your opponent, especially before a conference championship game. But, that is just what former Oakland Raiders head coach John Madden did before the 1974 AFC Championship Game according to former Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Mel Blount.
Blount joined The Eye Test for Two podcasts recently and told the story of how the ever-stoic head coach Chuck Noll fired up his team before taking on the Raiders with the trip to the Super Bowl on the line.
“I’ll never forget when they [the Raiders] beat Miami and the playoff game, and that was in 1974,” said Blount. “And I think John Madden said the two best teams had played already and Chuck Noll, which he never does, he came into the meeting and he said that they said the two best teams had already played in AFC. And he said, ‘But the best team is right here in this room.’ And it just lit a fire under every player. We went out there and beat them when all the experts were saying that we shouldn’t win and that we would not win it.”
Despite eventually winning the Super Bowl in 1974, the Steelers were not by any means the dynasty they would be. Both the Miami Dolphins and Raiders finished above the Steelers in the standings, and the Dolphins were coming off back-to-back Super Bowl wins and were only two seasons removed from their perfect season. The Raiders, on the other hand, made the conference championship the year before and in 1974 had the league MVP in QB Ken Stabler.
The 1970s were setting up to be the decade of Dolphins and Raiders dominance, and after the Raiders vanquished the Dolphins thanks to The Sea of Hands, as Blount said, Madden basically said that game was the Super Bowl.
After Noll’s comment, the Steelers, who up to that point in their history had only won one playoff game through the history, dominated the Raiders in a rematch of the previous year’s playoff match which Pittsburgh lost by 19.
As Blount said, not many people picked the Steelers to win that AFC championship game in Oakland. In fact, the Steelers were 5.5 point underdogs entering the game showing that many did not expect the Steelers to put up a huge fight against the dominant Raiders.
Despite this, the Steelers went out and dominated, holding the Raiders’ number-one offense in the league to only 13 points and 278 yards. Blount and his fellow Steel Curtain teammates shut down MVP Stabler baiting him into three interceptions.
The game was close throughout, but just like the current Steelers, the 1974 Steelers came back and pulled away in the fourth quarter. Pittsburgh entered the final quarter trailing 10-3 and finished the game scoring 21 points and holding the Raiders to only three, winning 24-13.
Pittsburgh got their revenge from the year prior and proved that Madden was just a bit premature in declaring the Raiders and Dolphins as the two best teams. Noll’s motivational speech, while short and to the point, had the Steelers fired up and ready to play, which helped lead to the upset.
