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Sunday, October 29, 2000

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? Jon Witman didn't immediately or fully fill Tim Lester's shoes. He kind of grew into them. But at the point he was injured, he provided Jerome Bettis with his best escort since Lester and the Bus' senior prom. Now that Witman's gone, you can see vividly what his absence has meant.

In this offense, the fullback throws the key block at the point of attack. If he misses, or gets shoved back into the running lane, Bettis is left to his own devices, which is not his forte. You've got to get him to the line of scrimmage.

Because of his unfamiliarity with the role, Chris Fuamatu-Ma'afala was understandably tentative in his initial foray into the fullback's world of the unnoticed. He was tiptoeing into the breach. That doesn't work.

As a tailback, because you line up 5 to 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage, you get an extra second or two to survey the landscape. A fullback, in a down stance, facemask-to-QB-butt, doesn't have any extra time to make such decisions. The ball is snapped and BOOM! ... the bad guys are right there in front of you. You've got to make an instantaneous decision as to which wrong-colored jersey to block, then proceed aggressively.

And, darn the luck, linebackers, being disagreeable sorts by nature, won't stand there and allow you to knock them down like bowling pins. They move, beasts of prey looking for the ballcarrier. If the fullback doesn't read and react, the next thing he's wondering is "What are they going to call on second-and-12?"

One cannot underplay the importance of the fullback in this offense. As implausible as it would have seemed in August, Dan Kreider is now a key to the Steelers' success, not only today but for the rest of the season.

Now that Fu is out for at least a month and Richard Huntley has shown little except a penchant for injury, if I was Amos Zereoue, I would charter a flight to Lourdes and dip that turf toe into the magic water. This is his chance.

In baseball, when a team installs a revolving door on the manager's office, propelled by the same general manager, at some point you've got to take a serious look at the GM and wonder if he, and not the field manager, is the problem. In football, when you have revolving offensive coordinators in charge of largely ineffective offenses with ineffective quarterbacks, at what point do you begin questioning the quarterbacks instead of the coordinators?

A caller asked Monday, "When you heard that the Pirates had hired Lloyd McClendon, were you happy?" I thought about that and replied, "Well, I wasn't unhappy." Damning with faint praise, I suppose. But the more I see, the more I hear, the more I like Lloyd McClendon.

I haven't had much experience with him. Generally, you don't interview role players or hitting coaches all that often. On the couple of occasions I did, although hardly enough to form a comprehensive opinion on a complex human being, I found McClendon to be a serious man, a man whose baseball and life experiences have toughened and hardened him.

As I've often written, this team needs a manager-sized spiked shoe pressed firmly against its backside. This is a soft team, a team that, with very few exceptions, has too little grit. A team that will embrace winning, but only if it's within arm's length.

Not enough players are willing to fight for it. True, they don't have enough quality ballplayers. But even truer, not enough players, whatever their talent level, with enough resolve.

I believe McClendon will demand that, find the players who have it, and eliminate those who don't. It's one thing to lose, it's another to embarrass yourselves and your fan base.

That's what happened last season -- Pirates fans were embarrassed by their team's play. Maybe more embarrassed than some players who seemed satisfied to receive a major-league paycheck, secure in the knowledge that they would be in Bradenton or some other tropical spring training site next March.

First, you've got to stop the bleeding. To do that, you've got to identify its source. I suspect McClendon will do that. I don't know how much he'll win, but I believe he'll make sure the players feel, and fear, the pain of losing.