Steelers Today – A Pittsburgh Steelers blog

Pop quiz:  Name 5 players on the Kansas City Chiefs.  Hint – Larry Johnson no longer plays for them.

If you struggled to name 5 players on this team, welcome to the club.  So did I.  It took me a moment to remember that the Chief were the team that ended up signing Matt Cassell to play quarterback.  I had also forgotten that they drafted Tyson Jackson, a player that I hoped the Steelers might get during the draft.

The Steelers will travel to Arrowhead Stadium to face this hard-to-name bunch on Sunday.

The Chiefs are ranked 30th in the NFL on offense, and 27th on defense.  So it is safe to say that they are not a very good team.

Coming off the loss to the Bengals, and with a game against the Baltimore Ravens coming up next week, this may be just what the doctor ordered for the Steelers.  The Chiefs should provide a nice tune-up game with little chance of a loss.  This will give the Steelers an opportunity to give Troy Polamalu additional rest for his knee.  It will also give them more time to rest Travis Kirschke, who practiced on Wednesday, but then had  a setback on Thursday.

I expect to see the Steelers utilize Rashard Mendenhall early and often in this game.  Not just because they want to make it up to him for completely forgetting about him in last week’s loss to the Bengals, but also because the Chiefs are terrible against the run.  The Chiefs’ defense gives up 141.3 yards per game on the ground.  Do you think that Rashard looks forward to running against them?  Yeah me too.

Rashard Mendenhall

The only problem is that the Chiefs defense is also terrible against the pass.  They’ve given up more pass plays that went for 40 yards or more than any other team in the NFL.  I’ll bet Santonio Holmes and Mike Wallace can’t wait to face these defensive backs.

The Steelers defense is probably equally excited.  The Chiefs’ offense averages 166.6 passing yards per game.  No you didn’t read that wrong.   Didn’t Larry Johnson used to run for  more yards per game than that in his prime?  How can a team average so few yards in the air?  Perhaps they are formidible on the ground.  Nope, they only average 100 rushing yards per game.  See why James Harrison is probably excited?  He probably envisions having 5 or 6 sacks this game.

But of course, we don’t want the team to get overconfident.  After all, we don’t want this to become a trap game.  But it is pretty difficult to imagine the Steelers losing this one.

I’m going to predict a Steelers victory by a score of 35-10.

(If you enjoyed this article, please consider leaving a comment below. Also, please subscribe to our blog by pressing the orange button below. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter by clicking the doohickies at the bottom of the right column of this page.  Thanks.)

Subscribe in a reader