Super Bowl week brings out the nostalgia and what-could-have-been for former players and coaches; for the Pittsburgh Steelers, they continue to deal with former Seattle Seahawks and their inability to get over losing to them in Super Bowl XL.
RB Shaun Alexander just said that he believes the Seahawks would have beaten the Steelers 99 times out of 100 in Super Bowl XL. Unfortunately for Seattle, the actual game was number 100, apparently. But head coach Mike Holmgren agreed that his Seahawks were the better team.
He hopped on the Ian Furness Show podcast to talk football and his Super Bowl history. He won one as head coach with the Green Bay Packers and lost one. With the Seahawks, he only made it to the Super Bowl in 2005, as the No. 1 seed, losing to the sixth-seeded Steelers.
Furness said that he tells everyone in Seattle that the Seahawks were the better team. “Yeah”, Holmgren responded in acknowledgement. “We had a couple injuries early in the game that hurt us—really hurt us. And then the officiating—a lot has been talked about the officiating. But Pittsburgh was a good football team. And that was a Pittsburgh home game because of all the yellow flags and everything”.
The officiating certainly has been talked about a lot in the past nearly 20 years since that game. Dave Bryan did some detective work way back in 2010 when Steelers Depot largely operated as a one-man show.
Alexander’s teammate, QB Matt Hasselbeck, didn’t necessarily say they would have won 99 times out of 100. Instead, he said that he felt they actually tried too hard. He did not put the blame on the officiating but rather themselves.
You can certainly make the argument that the Seahawks were the better team. After all, they went 13-3 during the regular season and had the top scoring offense and a top-10 defense. Alexander rushed for an utterly ridiculous 27 touchdowns.
But the Steelers defense held him to 95 rushing yards and no scores on 20 carries. In contrast, Steelers RB Willie Parker popped off a 75-yard touchdown run, still the longest run in Super Bowl history.
Once Pittsburgh scored a touchdown shortly before the half, it never held a lead of fewer than four points. And the game ended up 21-10. For a team that averaged 28.3 points per game, that’s not a good look.
But they faced one of the top defenses in the league. The Steelers gave up 16.1 points per game and ranked in the top five in both points and yards allowed. Much is made of their being a sixth seed, but they were a good team. They were 7-2 before a three-game skid and finished 11-5.
That’s good enough to win a lot of divisions most years. Including half of 2023’s division winners.
