Steelers understand Saints’ plight

— Mike Tomlin would argue that the defending champion New Orleans Saints aren’t as different from last season as their recent stumbles have made them look.

The Pittsburgh coach takes a big-picture approach, suggesting the real story is that the NFL is simply a tough league - competitive from top to bottom.

“Repeating is not what’s difficult; just winning is difficult,” said Tomlin, whose Steelers followed up their 2008 championship by missing the playoffs in 2009. “It doesn’t matter whether you’ve done it the year before or not.There are 32 teams vying for the world championship, and it’s a difficult journey.

“The fact that you’re defending champs probably is an issue for those on the outside, but just walking the journey itself is a difficult one.”

It so happens that the Steelers’ journey has them walking to New Orleans tonight for a clash of the past two Super Bowl winners.

That also happens to be Halloween night, a wildly popular holiday in a city with a long tradition of embracing opportunities to dress in costume. The Louisiana Superdome will be loaded with fans wearing masks of many kinds and hoping their team dresses up as the 2009 Saints - the team that announced beyond all doubt it was for real by crushing New England in a prime-time game here last November.

Drew Brees, who showed up Tom Brady by throwing for 371 yards and five touchdowns in that contest, said there is a similar sense of anticipation about the meeting with the 5-1 Steelers.

“We always have something to prove when we step on the field,” said Brees, who threw 11 interceptions all of last season but has 10 so far in 2010. “Now, we know everybody’s watching. Especially with the way the season’s gone so far, there’s no better time to get back on track than on a national stage on Sunday night against the Steelers.”

In the wake of a 30-17 loss at home to a Cleveland Browns club that came in at 1-5 and was a nearly twotouchdown underdog, the Saints have been constantly reminded this week of how unfavorably their 2010 squad compares to that of a year ago.

Through seven games in 2009 - all victories - the Saints were averaging a whopping 39 points, were leading the league in offense and were even scoring touchdowns on defense.

This season, two rookie quarterbacks - Arizona’s Max Hall and Cleveland’s Colt McCoy - have gotten their first career victories at the expense of the defending champions, who are hovering just above mediocrity at 4-3.

Pittsburgh’s post-title funk didn’t follow quite the same pattern last season.

The Steelers opened 6-2, but after some key injuries, they started to look worn down and faded down the stretch. Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger struggled through that period and a 2-6 start from which his team could not recover in 2006, the season after Pittsburgh’s 2005 title.

In both 2006 and 2009, Roethlisberger recalled, the offseason seemed short - maybe too short to rest, heal and mentally refresh. Then there was roster turnover at a couple key positions, along with the elevated expectations from the media and a fan base energized by the previous year’s success.

“Other players get a chance to go to other places. There’s a lot of expectations on you. You kind of put the pressure on yourself just as much as anyone else does,”Roethlisberger said. “A lot of it was feeling worn down and feeling beaten up [and] the added pressure of trying to do a repeat.”

As for how the Saints are handling their success, Roethlisberger said he would advise against rushing to judgment, even if New Orleans did lose to the last-place team in the Steelers’ division last weekend.

“It’s early. They’re a great football team, one of the best in the league,” Roethlisberger said. “They have some really great players and coaches and everything. I don’t think it’s time to panic if I’m a Saints fan.”

As far back as the first offseason training sessions last spring, Brees and Coach Sean Payton started talking about the challenges teams face on the heels of a title.They researched it, reminding the rest of the team that five of the previous 11 Super Bowl winners had failed to even make the playoffs the next season. They spoke to Patriots Coach Bill Belichick, San Francisco Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott and even Los Angeles Lakers guard Derek Fisher about the keys to repeating as champions.

Yet, after all that time thinking and talking about how to maintain their edge, they have looked vulnerable in six of their first seven games, with the lone exception being their 31-6 victory at Tampa Bay two weeks ago.

“We knew that this journey was not going to be easy going through this season, and we knew that we would have peaks and valleys,” Brees said. “We just happen to be in one of those valleys. It feels like we’ve been in it for a while and we all want to get out of it.

“Human nature might be to get down and be negative, point fingers, to feel like you need to press, put added pressure on yourself - and I think we’re a lot more experienced than that. Everybody’s encountered situations like this where you’re working your tails off and it doesn’t seem to be happening, but you just have to keep grinding.”

Sports, Pages 27 on 10/31/2010

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