Add it all up, and Hawks look like they’re best

DETROIT – Considering the dungstorm Jerramy Stevens managed to set off this past week with the cheeky notion that the Seattle Seahawks might actually win the Super Bowl today, it’s odd that all his remarks weren’t parsed as thoroughly.

Yes, the Seahawks’ injudicious young tight end could have left well enough alone rather than suggest that Pittsburgh teddy bear Jerome Bettis’ Detroit homecoming might not have a happy ending. And how dare he say that Steelers linebacker Joey Porter might have a tougher time handling Walter Jones than some other NFL tackle – even if Jones is first-team All-World, and proclaimed so by the Steelers themselves.

Hey, if the Steelers wanted a throw-down, they should have checked the fine print.

“It doesn’t matter if they know what’s coming,” Stevens said on Wednesday, assessing the Pittsburgh defense’s savvy and toughness, “they’ve still got to stop it.”

Yowser. Now that’s not trash, that’s temerity.

Never mind that it happens to be true.

And never mind that both quarterback Matt Hasselbeck and even coach Mike Holmgren made somewhat the same point that same day in a separate discussion, this one about the worth of audibles – changing a play at the line of scrimmage because the look of a defense suggests the original call might not work.

“It actually helps me to know that (Holmgren) doesn’t want me to audible,” Hasselbeck said. “He just doesn’t. There are other things that are more important to him than (having) the perfect play designed on a chalkboard.

“Against some defenses, you can’t tell. You can’t be right.”

So you have to be better.

And that’s the point. A great portion of the team in this watershed season for the Seahawks, they’ve been just that – better than the team across from them. They had better people – as they’ve had for a couple of years now – and when they didn’t (remember the three games when they were missing their two starting receivers and still won?) they had a better approach. And this year, finally, they didn’t screw it up.

It’s true – but, of course, truth is a partially told story. The ending comes today.

So how much of a jump is it to prove they’re the best?

It’s easy to see how Pittsburgh has become the safe, sentimental and understandable favorite in Super Bowl XL – a misjudgment made early on in this corner, too. It’s been heightened by having the game here in Detroit, where “The Bus” first pulled away from the station and which shares the same blue-collar civic image the football team so loves to front (though it’s never helped the Lions much; must be those infernal domes).

The AFC is superior and has produced six of the last eight Super Bowl winners. The Steelers are on an undeniable roll, what with those three road victories in the playoffs. They have the hot young quarterback and everybody loves those, the younger the better.

But they haven’t been in this game in a decade and they lost that one, so whatever aura they possess seems to boil down to Bettis, who is mostly a hood ornament these days, plus the gunslinger QB who overachieves on the dating circuit and Porter, the verbal diarrhetic.

What they are is another good team that’s been better than the guys across from them.

The clincher for Steelers believers is that Seattle played a weaker schedule, and mathematically that’s so. But Pittsburgh beat exactly two playoff teams in the regular season, same as the Seahawks, and let’s not forget that the playoff opener was won against a backup quarterback, not to suggest the outcome would have been any different.

There are other numbers that hint against the spread. Seattle’s attack has been more balanced in the playoffs – Shaun Alexander rushed for as many yards against Carolina as Pittsburgh’s Willie Parker managed in three games. Perhaps the most important of all, the Seahawks are the NFL’s best at scoring inside the 20 – 43 touchdowns in 60 possessions – and second in keeping opponents out of the end zone from there. Twenty four of those touchdowns came from Alexander running behind the best left side of an offensive line in the league – and an underrated right side.

“It’s really pretty simple and nobody likes to hear it,” said Seahawks center Robbie Tobeck, “but most games are decided up front – pushing them off the ball and not getting pushed off the ball. Sure, plays have to be made, but games are won and lost by who controls that.”

And who controls, well, themselves.

“Whether it was the first Rams game, the Dallas game, the New York Giants game or a couple of others, this team has managed to make the right play in situations we didn’t handle very well before,” Holmgren said. “It has been a different team right from the beginning.”

Different enough, it would seem, to be the best.