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Old 01-18-2009, 12:37 AM  
Tribal Warfare Tribal Warfare is offline
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Babb: Steelers provide a Super model As Pioli tries to mold Chiefs into winner


Steelers provide a Super model As Pioli tries to mold Chiefs into winner

By KENT BABB
The Kansas City Star

PITTSBURGH | They keep the silver trophies behind half-inch glass, a clear wall that gets you close to greatness but not too close.

These didn’t come easy, of course, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are understandably protective of their five Super Bowl trophies. They’re kept in the team’s offices, on the second floor of a building five miles and two rivers from Heinz Field. Behind one glass partition sits five pedestals, another half-inch glass case on top, surrounding each 23-inch trophy. There are books and faded photographs behind the pedestals, but the Steelers know what you came to see.

“Each one,” communications director Dave Lockett says, “kind of tells a little story.”

The one on the left tells the story of Terry Bradshaw outgunning Fran Tarkenton and the Purple People Eaters. The middle one whispers about Rocky Bleier bearhugging an onside kick with 22 seconds left in 1979. The new one, now three years old and the trophy that justified this room’s armored upgrade, might still have Jerome Bettis’ fingerprints somewhere under that professional shine. There are five pedestals, but Franco and Mean Joe and Big Ben are in here, too.

More than 800 miles west, the Chiefs want to start telling some stories of their own. They’re looking to new general manager Scott Pioli to lead them into the second phase of a massive rebuilding effort.

According to the team’s top decision makers, that effort is molded in part in the Steelers’ image.

The “Pittsburgh Model,” they call it; that’s the direction Chiefs chairman Clark Hunt is taking his team, and he’s charging Pioli with the details. Hunt has seen the Super Bowl trophies, and he wants a few more to add to the Chiefs’ loner in the team’s spotless new headquarters. He likes the Steelers’ commitment to stability — three head coaches in 40 years and none fired during that time — and that they’ve been owned by the same family since the Great Depression, when $2,500 could buy you a football team.

The investment is more substantial these days, but Hunt has made it clear he possesses a vision for the future and a determination to catch the Chiefs up with the Steelers and the other teams that rule the AFC. His plan includes smart draft choices, being selective in free agency and keeping the same faces in the building.

“That’s how Pittsburgh does it,” Hunt says.

As difficult a job as Pioli faces in rebuilding the Chiefs, an unwritten job requirement is building rapport with Hunt. That means shaping the team into Hunt’s vision — while drawing from his own experiences in New England and the success he found there.

Hunt admires the Steelers. Pioli knows only the Patriot Way — star free agents and a cutthroat mentality that winning trumps loyalty. Pioli’s biggest challenge could be balancing what he knows and what his boss wants. And if he’s as good as his reputation indicates, accomplishing both.

In the meantime, the two stand at a crossroads that will go a long way toward determining the Chiefs’ identity: whether to retain coach Herm Edwards. One route could lead to faster success, but the other continues that stability Hunt keeps talking about.

Until then, the Chiefs remain in a holding pattern the Steelers rarely worry themselves with. Kansas City has appeared in two Super Bowls, but none since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger. The Steelers today are one win from appearing in two Super Bowls this decade.

“It’s the standard,” Lockett says. “That’s why Kansas City is looking at us.”

Hunt says he began looking a few years ago at the things the Steelers were doing, and he began making mental notes. He says he has begun a plan that he hopes will someday mirror the Chiefs and Steelers. But he also admits it will take time for Kansas City to keep up and match Pittsburgh as a model franchise.

The trophy room expansion will have to wait.

• • •

There’s something confusing about all this to Bobby Bell. He’s the former Chiefs great, and he’s trying to think of where the two teams’ paths diverged. Pittsburgh kept winning, and Kansas City went into a decades-long funk.

“We had, at one point, some great players,” says Bell, a linebacker who played in two Super Bowls in the late 1960s.

The Steelers have appeared in a record 14 AFC championship games in 38 years, an average appearance coming nearly half as often as each presidential election.

The Chiefs, of course, haven’t played in the conference title game since 1993. That’s Kansas City’s only appearance since the merger. Whatever the Chiefs did to win in Bell’s time …

“We kind of got away from it, I guess,” Bell says. “Evidently, we got away from something.”

For most of its history, Kansas City possessed none of the things Hunt admires now of Pittsburgh. There was no consistency; since Hank Stram led the team to the Super Bowl championship after the ’69 season, the Chiefs have changed coaches nine times. There was little emphasis selecting the right draft picks and growing them into stars; longtime former president and general manager Jack Steadman has said he allowed Kansas City’s Super Bowl team to get old, some players on the roster perhaps five years too long.

While the Chiefs were learning the hard way, the Steelers kept drafting Hall of Famers. Heck, they drafted four in 1974 alone.

“A lot of players have come in and paid their dues,” former Pittsburgh coach Bill Cowher said on a conference call. “It happens when you win.”

By the time the Chiefs had figured themselves out, two decades had passed since they’d won the Super Bowl, that old silver trophy still alone and beginning to collect dust.

The men in powerful positions kept changing, and Hunt admits that’s not the kind of organization he’d like to run. After introducing Pioli last week, Hunt joked that the Chiefs change general managers only every two decades.

Hunt would like to keep that part of the plan in place. But now he and Pioli have a decision to make: whether Edwards keeps his job. Hunt said part of that Pittsburgh model is that the Rooney family, which owns the Steelers, shares input on personnel decisions. Hunt and Pioli said last week they’d speak often about all football decisions, particularly those as important as coaching changes.

Hunt reportedly approves of Edwards’ poise and determination, if not his 15-33 regular-season record in three years with the Chiefs, and would prefer to make a change only if necessary.

Pioli says he wants the Chiefs’ coach, whoever that will be, to be the team’s “main voice.” With that in mind, former Chiefs player Bell says time is a factor. He agrees that Hunt and Pioli need to get it right, but Kansas City cannot move forward until it knows which coach will lead it there.

Forging its path, Bell says, is the only way Kansas City can begin catching up with the teams it admires — but for now cannot compete with.

“You just need to go out there and do it,” Bell says.

• • •

Hunt interviewed Pioli for nine hours two weeks ago, and the men spoke last week about chemistry and a shared vision.

One of the things the men have in common is that they learned about loyalty the hard way. Pioli watched in 1995 as his mentor and friend Bill Belichick was fired as Cleveland’s head coach. The Browns had four losing seasons in Belichick’s five years. That was enough for then-owner Art Modell, who not only fired Belichick but also moved the team to Baltimore.

Later, Pioli followed Belichick to New England and was part of rebuilding the Patriots. Pioli and Belichick won three Super Bowls in their nine seasons together, and they did it after New England owner Robert Kraft decided in 2000 that a front-office overhaul was necessary.

The Patriots philosophy was to make painful decisions that were ultimately beneficial. They chose to keep late-round draft pick Tom Brady as the starting quarterback over fan favorite Drew Bledsoe — and won the Super Bowl. When a player gets too expensive, they let him go — Lawyer Milloy, Deion Branch, Adam Vinatieri.

As Pioli shadowed Belichick, he learned that the only path to job security is success. And Edwards just hasn’t had the kind of success that New England would find acceptable, and the coach’s record might be too much for Pioli to overlook.

“Using all of that as a background,” Pioli said last week, “to come here to Kansas City and create some of the things we created back there.”

Hunt could, of course, look toward Pittsburgh when he and Pioli decide Edwards’ fate. The Steelers’ four Super Bowl wins in the 1970s granted coach Chuck Noll an unofficial lifetime appointment, and by the time he retired in 1991, new coach Cowher was a 34-year-old former coordinator expected to return Pittsburgh to glory. He reached the playoffs in his first six seasons but then missed the next three postseasons. Pittsburgh grew restless, and in 1999 Cowher was rumored to be on his way out.

But ownership stuck with Cowher long enough for the Steelers to return to the 2001 playoffs, four years before the team added that fifth Super Bowl trophy.

“The one thing that the Rooneys have done is that they understand that process; they understand the game,” Cowher said. “There are going to be some down cycles in there. There’s an understanding when you’ve been in this business that sometimes you’re going to have one of those years. But they have been very stable people.”

Patience, stability and championships aside, here is one thing the Rooneys have never had to deal with: going 4-12 and 2-14 in consecutive years. In the Steelers’ most down years since Noll started collecting trophies, they’ve never won fewer than six games in a season.

And that might be the simplest reason why Pittsburgh and Kansas City have far different histories. Owners prefer stability and loyalty toward coaches — but not at the expense of losing seasons.

“If you don’t win,” Cowher says, “there’s going to be change.”

• • •

Men in crisp suits filed out of an auditorium at Chiefs headquarters Wednesday, still feeling the Scott Pioli high. There was a reception beginning soon, but some former players and team employees stopped in the atrium to hobnob with familiar faces and take stock in where the Chiefs are in their history.

The Edwards decision is one of many moves that could begin a chain reaction to follow the Chiefs for years, and Pioli and Hunt said they’re not taking such a decision lightly.

Perhaps that’s what the Steelers would do.

“The stability of the organization,” Cowher says, “has allowed that thing to thrive.”

Hunt says he fancies the Chiefs as Pittsburgh with a splash of New England. The Patriots, of course, are the dynasty of the decade, and Hunt did hire a New England executive in Pioli.

Hunt shrugged his shoulders when talking about what he’d like the future Chiefs to resemble. He leaned against a rail, one floor above the pedestal that holds Kansas City’s Super Bowl trophy. Men walk by and squeeze his arm, some of them knowing that Hunt and Pioli stand on the only firm footing within the organization.

And they stand there facing a tall task.

Hunt likes Pittsburgh; that much is easy to tell. Now Hunt and Pioli have to find out which of the Steelers’ attributes they’d rather have: stability or the temptation of hiring the next Cowher. With a team as disorganized as the Chiefs, there has to be a choice.

Hunt would like to have it all. For now, all he can do is imagine what that would be like.

“It would be nice,” the Chiefs chairman says, “if the next Clark Hunt, whoever it is, 10 years down the road is taking over the responsibility of running an NFL franchise and says: ‘We’ve got to do it like Kansas City does it.’

“It used to be like that. We need to try to achieve that again.”
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:44 AM   #2
keg in kc keg in kc is offline
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Nice article. Even if it ultimately doesn't really say much.
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:52 AM   #3
Tribal Warfare Tribal Warfare is offline
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Huh, the Cowher rumors may have some water
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:56 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by Tribal Warfare View Post
Huh, the Cowher rumors may have some water
I thought that, too. But at the same time, Cowher's how old? Early 50s? I guess he could coach into his 60s, but at the same time, 'the next Cowher' would seem to insinuate a younger coach.

Then again, he's not as old as Ferentz.

Not really who I'd like to see, but if that's really their model, it would make some sense. I just don't see him only coaching, with little say in personnel, unless Pioli thinks he could work similar to how he worked with Belichick.
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:58 AM   #5
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And some of you schmucks thought Clark Hunt didn't care.

Shame on you.
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Old 01-18-2009, 01:00 AM   #6
Tribal Warfare Tribal Warfare is offline
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Not really who I'd like to see, but if that's really their model, it would make some sense. I just don't see him only coaching, with little say in personnel, unless Pioli thinks he could work similar to how he worked with Belichick.
Pioli and Cowher are good friends apparently, and would go under Pioli's reference of like minded personnel choices with a close working relationship.
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Old 01-18-2009, 01:28 AM   #7
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This is like a two paragraph blog entry on the Star site that Babb somehow stretched into a 5 page article.
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Old 01-18-2009, 01:29 AM   #8
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This is like a two paragraph blog entry on the Star site that Babb somehow stretched into a 5 page article.
Well he did go to Pittsburgh.
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Old 01-18-2009, 08:14 AM   #9
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Nice article. Even if it ultimately doesn't really say much.
I thought it provided a little more insight into the kind of working relationship that Hunt and Pioli are trying to forge.

And reading it, I thought to myself that the Steelers are really the model that New England has followed, i.e. letting players leave before they get old.

The Patriots have just been more successful at it this decade.
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Old 01-18-2009, 08:24 AM   #10
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A little boring, but it scares me that if Herm is kept this year he may be offered an extension.
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Old 01-18-2009, 09:53 AM   #11
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Could this mean they are looking at someone inside the steelers organization now? If so who?

or isnt russ grimm with the cards?
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Old 01-18-2009, 11:24 AM   #12
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This is like a two paragraph blog entry on the Star site that Babb somehow stretched into a 5 page article.
That's generally my thought as well. A little bit of information in a L-O-N-G article. Better written than Whitlock's though. I do agree with Milkman tha it gives more insight into what Clark may be thinking for the direction of this franchise.

With that said, Mr. Hunt, Herm Edwards is not the man to guide your franchise for the next 10 years.

I would't be upset with Cowher, I always liked him, but I agree, let's find the next Cowher.
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Old 01-18-2009, 11:32 AM   #13
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Since Clark admires the Steelers so much how about a coach whose hometown is Pittsburg? Oh year other credentials-- 41 years old which is close to Clark and Pioli and is young enough to be our coach for the next 10-15 years. 17 years experience coaching in the NFL. Coached under Parchells with both the Jets and Cowboys. NEVER coached under Herm Edwards.

That man is Todd Haley, OC for the Cardinals. He can't interview while the Cardinals are in the playoffs so what's the rush in firing Herm?
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:30 PM   #14
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Old 01-18-2009, 12:49 PM   #15
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You cant model yourself after a successful organization when you have a coach like Herm still leading and guiding your franchise...
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