Sports Redux: Slammed

There's ugly, and then there's ugly, and then there's the Patriots/Steelers game yesterday. Which was a matchup between a very good football team and a team that really didn't look like it knew what it was doing.

It was 10-10 at the half, so at least there was some hope, if mixed with frustration. But the second half devolved into a nightmare of dropped balls, turnovers, long Pittsburgh drives and misery, all in a sullen nasty rain. Three fumbles and two interceptions later, the Steelers were cruising to their eventual 33-10 win and had nothing left to play for except for clocking Wes Welker on (what looked to our admittedly biased eyes) a cheap shot, knocking him out of the game. "It was not like I was trying to be cheap," said Ryan Clark, who administered the hit, which is totally what you tell the press when you know it was a cheap shot and want to salvage whatever you can out of it. Stay classy, Steelers.

So the Pats drop to 7-5. The Jets lost, too, so the AFC East still isn't settled, and the Patriots still have a shot at climbing over Baltimore for the wild card anyway. Bob Ryan says everybody should chill out because the Pats play crappy teams most of the rest of the way and won't see anyone as good as the Steelers until the playoffs, which works if you're the kind of team that considers just getting into the playoffs a successful season, which the Patriots are not. Except in this crazy season, maybe they are. It's all so confusing.