NFL: BRONCOS & THE STEELERS // NBA: THE GOOD START 

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            UNTIL AFTER THE CURRENT NFL SEASON, “SPORTS NOTEBOOK” WILL POST NEW EVERY MONDAY INSTEAD OF ON TUESDAY, continuing with a new post every Friday.  Editor, Marvin Leibstone. Comments to: mlresources1@aol.com

NFL  ---  “WE’ve got to play it hard and full out, for there’s no coasting for a football team that wants to be an AFC champion, Super Bowl-bound.” Surely this phrase approximates what’s on the mind of each Denver Broncos player manning up to face a Pittsburgh Steelers counterpart this weekend, hoping to be as combat ready as a Navy SEAL or Army Ranger given a difficult mission, determined to avoid any error that contributed to the Denver franchise losing eight games during the regular NFL season, giving away more than 250 points to opponents.

But if the Broncos are anything like the team that faced the Kansas City Chiefs last week and lost, the Steelers will own the day more easily than the Chiefs had. If the Broncos quarterback, Tim Tebow, is, for whatever reason, as limited in the pocket/shotgun as he was versus the Chiefs, he’ll be too late locating receivers, therefore unable to rack up a sufficient number of handoffs or passes for territory enabling field goal and touchdown attempts.

There’s hope for the Tebow-led offense, however, from a Steelers defense putting speed ahead of smarts, leaving openings for either Tebow or backs like Willis McGahee to rush the football for a streak of first downs, and if the Steelers secondary fails to cover Denver’s wide receivers completely and Tebow manages to throw accurately to a WR, as he had for some of the Broncos mid-season wins.

Yet if a resurrection of the Tebow magic occurs versus the Steelers, with an early Denver lead accrued the Broncos defense will have to rev up its attempts to keep Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger from the short angular and deep pass completions that he’s capable of, those deep passing stops depending greatly on speed and skills employed by Denver cornerbacks, Champ Bailey and Andre Miller.

The Steelers finished the NFL regular season at 12-4, the Broncos, 8-8. Also suggesting superiority over the Broncos is that the Steelers beat teams that during the regular season hadn’t just beat the Broncos but had taken the Denver team down by more than 14 points, among them, the New England Patriots. And, a comparison of wins shows that the Steelers prevailed against teams that the Broncos had beaten, among them, the Tennessee Titans, Cincinnati Bengals, San Diego Chargers and the Chiefs.

Too, in any win or loss during the season, the Steelers defense never once gave away more than 20 points to an adversary, while the Broncos gave away more than 40 points in each of four lost games---vs. Green Bay, New England, Buffalo and Detroit. Also, the Steelers lost games only to teams high in the rankings, each a post-season contender, while most of the Broncos wins were against marginal franchises.

Though the heavy hitters among betters are with the Steelers beating the Broncos by more than a TD, it’s unwise to discount a Broncos team that won six games straight this year. No-one should mistakenly think that a Tebow-led offense can’t re-establish as a winning unit in the manner that it had for its successive wins, primarily from Tebow’s surprisingly fierce rushing.

So, if the Steelers could lose four games since September, they could lose a fifth providing that the Tebow magic of past games aligns with third and fourth down opportunities at, say, goal and five or 10, this because Tebow had the necessary pocket/shotgun protection and receivers helping him get there. Of course, the Broncos defense will need to emphasize fundamentals, neutralizing enough of the Steelers opportunities to score by being sufficiently mobile, tackling and blocking speedily. Also, there can’t be Broncos fumbles or interceptions of Tebow’s passes, either for the FG or TD, and there will need to be minimum Broncos penalties and very few Tebow sacks---all an extremely tall order, a set of outcomes difficult for any NFL post-season team to make happen,  yet still  possible.

NBA ---  IT’s probably too early to pick up on which exactly are the positive effects of a shorter NBA season, but less than a month into the 2011/12 foray a few signs could make the cut for convincing the NBA commissioner that there’s merit to a shorter than 82 game year, for instance, teams seem to be playing full out, as if already in a post-season---good for the teams, good for the fans. The slow start that can occur in the longer season while some teams work out kinks and experiment with a whacky idea or two is now unthinkable. More precisely, the current first NBA month has been a heightened race compared with the first 30 days of previous seasons.

Also, because a 2011 lockout denied early preparation for an upcoming season, the NBA teams entered recent competition raw. This going to war minus the usual readiness has resulted in an unexpected necessity, players depending on each other more than in the past, cooperation among players becoming more key to winning, for even the league’s superstars went back a notch in skill-sets from the lockout.

In other words, the notion of superstar dominance could take a back seat to the concept of five-guy + reserves teamwork and the cooperation that exists as its core element. When I asked Denver Nuggets head coach, George Karl, a few seasons ago what he’d change in the NBA if he were king of the sport, his first response was that he’d enact a shorter season. Presently, the Nuggets are the likely NBA poster-guys for the concept of teamwork, beating last year’s championship team, the Dallas Mavericks, and runner-up, the L.A. Lakers, from “cooperative fires,” no Nuggets player forgetting to leave ego in the locker room, at the hard wood lots of passing, rebounding, blocking, plenty of assists, no wasted shots because a single player wants to impress via his three-pointer style.

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