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"Willie Parker has been the most impressive player in camp to date. Its pretty tough to beat desire and that's what Willie has a lot of." - wardismvp
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Super Bowl IX Another in a series of stories about
the 47 playoff games in Steelers history. Steelers dominate Vikings for 1st
championship By BOB
LABRIOLA Steelers.com Their charter flight from
They had quickly bottomed out at
1-13 during that 1969 season, but Noll already had the cornerstone in place
because his first No. 1 draft pick had been Joe Greene. The next year, it was
Terry Bradshaw; then in 1972, it was Franco Harris. Other pieces were added
along the way, and the Steelers eventually learned how to win. They had played
the role of Cinderella in 1972, the hunted prey in 1973, and the ignored in
1974. Once they had been a team with a good defense and a one-man running attack
for an offense, but on this flight they were a team with a dominant defense and
a balanced offense. They were confident, and they were
together. Author Roy Blount Jr. was on that
plane, and he wrote, "Tony Parisi, the equipment man, said, 'I'm giving you an
exclusive. I knew they were going to win this one. You know why? Before we left
for In the midst of the euphoria was
Noll, much looser and confident himself, but still focused on the ultimate
prize. "Making it is not enough," he told them. "We're not going down there to
be the disappointed team." Blessed with two weeks between the
conference championship game and Super Bowl IX, Noll and his staff installed
much of the game plan during that first week while the players still were in
somewhat of a regular routine at Three Rivers Stadium. As for the hype that was
just beginning to build around the game, much of the early attention was focused
on the Steelers' defense, primarily how it had stuffed the
The last time the Steelers had
eliminated the Raiders from the playoffs – in 1972 with the Immaculate Reception
– Coach In
Whether an inventive scheme or just
superior talent, the Steelers defense was doing things no other team had the
personnel to try. And debating why the results were what they were became as
pointless as trying to run the football against them. As rookie middle
linebacker Jack Lambert said after being asked to comment on the fact the
Raiders gained 29 yards rushing on 21 attempts: "They shouldn't have had that
much." Supposedly mitigating this
circumstance a bit was the fact the Vikings' All-Pro running back, Chuck
Foreman, had been hampered by injuries for the previous meeting between these
teams – a 1972 regular season game in Pittsburgh when the Steelers staged a
coming-out party with a 23-10 win. Surely, a healthy Foreman would have an
impact, and the Vikings would be able to move the football on the ground against
the Steelers. Surely, All-Pro center Mick Tingelhoff would have an answer for
the Stunt 4-3. Surely. Upon arriving in
Yet it was the Vikings who were dour
and seemed to be pressing. The Steelers had been told by Noll to experience the
Ray Mansfield was the team's
starting center, one of the few to survive Noll's Purge in 1969. This was his
12th season of life in the middle of an NFL line of scrimmage; he would be 33
nine days after the game. Reporters couldn't shut him up, nor could they wipe
the smile off his face. "Centers are totally overlooked people in this world,"
The teams' personalities certainly
came out on game day, and it started in the tunnel before the introduction of
the teams. Glen Edwards, wh So it would be. The Steelers defense
was better, more stingy even, than it had been against the Raiders. A healthy
Foreman had no impact on the Vikings' ability to run the ball against the
Steelers, and Tingelhoff had no answers for the Stunt 4-3. In fact, the Steelers defense scored
the only points of the first half on a safety when Dwight White downed Fran
Tarkenton in the end zone after the Vikings quarterback had covered a Dave
Osborn fumble. Just before halftime, just when
And the dominance of the defense
also took on the tone of Noll's favorite saying, "Whatever it takes." White had
been riddled with pneumonia all week, but he still crawled out of a hospital bed
the morning of the game and played. Before the first half ended, two of the
three starting linebackers – Jack Lambert and Andy Russell – were lost to
injuries, but Ed Bradley and Loren Toews played so well in their places that
some observers didn't even know there were backups on the
field. "White's playing showed the attitude
this team had through the whole playoffs," said Noll. "He symbolizes the
attitude of the whole defensive unit, the whole football
team." The offense centered around Franco
Harris, who set a Super Bowl record with 158 yards on 34 carries, and if
Bradshaw only finished with 94 yards passing, he did not throw an interception
and his touchdown pass to Larry Brown in the fourth quarter iced the 16-6 win. A
season that had been far from perfect ended perfectly. "Chuck told us that championship
teams don't run smooth, that it's rocky," said Greene. "After the
"I just wasn't prepared to
lose." When asked by NFL Films in 2006 to
talk about this Super Bowl, Greene said, "There is
something that champions have that you can only get by getting kicked around
until you say that you don't want to be kicked around anymore. I think that's
what happened over the course of the 1974 season." Steelers 0 2 7 7 16 Vikings 0 0 0 6 6
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