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Saints @ Steelers Game Day Thread

Maybe the city of Pittsburgh will be just as kind to the New Orleans Saints on Sunday as the city of New Orleans was to the Steelers many years ago.

It was January of 1970. The Steelers and Chicago Bears had finished the regular season 1-13, the worst two records in the NFL.

A coin toss at a New Orleans hotel during the week of Super Bowl IV would determine whether the No. 1 overall draft pick would go to the Steelers or the Bears.

https://wp.clutchpoints.com/wp-conte...ds-768x431.jpg

The Bears called “heads.” It was tails and became a toss that changed the Steelers franchise.

They used the first pick on a quarterback from Louisiana Tech named Terry Bradshaw, and their third-round pick on a defensive back from Southern University named Mel Blount.

Both ended up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, two cornerstones at the dawn of the Steelers’ dynasty.

Five years later, the Steelers came to New Orleans and won their first of six Super Bowls, beating the Minnesota Vikings 16-6 at Tulane Stadium.

“It was damn cold,” said Will Peneguy, a former sportswriter for The Times-Picayune who covered that Super Bowl. “That was the coldest I’ve ever been at a football game.”

It was so cold that Peneguy’s fingers were too frozen to write his story at the stadium. Instead, he had to drive back to the office to write.

The temperature that day, the coldest in Super Bowl history, was 39 degrees. That's about what it is expected to be Sunday at Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh where the Saints will play the Steelers.

This game is far from a Super Bowl, though.

Here we are in the middle of November and the 2022 version of the Saints and Steelers have combined for just five victories.

That’s two wins for the Steelers, who we knew might struggle while trying to replace longtime, Hall of Fame-bound quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

And three wins for the Saints, who have fallen short of expectations in the first season of the Dennis Allen era.

It’s rare, at least it has been over the past two decades, for the two teams to both be bad at the same time. In fact, only twice in the last 20 years (2003 and 2012) have both teams missed the playoffs in the same season.

It sure seems headed that way this season.

The Saints — thanks to playing in the watered-down NFC South, where every team has a losing record — have a better chance of reaching the postseason. But winning this one feels like a must for the Saints, who are trying to bounce back from Monday night's thrashing by the Baltimore Ravens.

This will be just the 17th meeting between the Saints and Steelers. That includes two games in 1968 when the teams competed in the Century Division together. This is just the seventh time over the last 30 years they have played. The only team the Saints have played less frequently during that time frame is the Houston Texans, who joined the league as an expansion team in 2002.

It’s just the seventh time the Saints have played in the Steel City. They are 2-0 in Acrisure Stadium, which opened in 2001 and was called Heinz Field until this season. The Saints biggest win in Pittsburgh came 35 years ago at Three Rivers Stadium. That 20-16 victory was the eighth in a strike-shortened 15-game season, clinching the Saints’ first winning season in franchise history. The Saints finished 12-3 that year and made their first playoff appearance. They have had 16 more winning seasons and made the postseason 13 more times since then.

A win in Pittsburgh could go a long way in adding to that number.

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