Steelers playing it cool, below the radar

Things have been relatively quiet for the Steelers this offseason when it comes to the talk coming from the team.

While they openly talked in previous years about their Super Bowl aspirations, scoring 30 points per game or being the team that was going to knock off the Patriots as the top team in the AFC, none of that has been happening this year.

Perhaps a healthy slice of humble pie fed to the team in the form of a 45-42 defeat at the hands of the Jacksonville Jaguars in a Divisional Playoff game in January is having an effect.

The aspirations? They're still there. But it's been a much more subdued team, of that there is no doubt.

One of the team's biggest critics, All-Pro guard David DeCastro, isn't displeased by the lack of big talk coming from his teammates.

"Maybe, I have no idea," he told me when I asked him about the lack of chatter among his teammates. "Every team out here is trying to win the Super Bowl."

Every team might pay lip service to having the goal of winning the Super Bowl, but the reality is that there are typically only a handful of teams that actually have an opportunity, the Steelers being one of them again this season.

So the fact there's been more talk coming out of places such as Cleveland or Jacksonville -- two of the handful of franchises that have never appeared in a Super Bowl -- makes things interesting.

"I think we're going 16-0," Jacksonville defensive tackle Malik Jackson said in an interview earlier this summer with TMZ Sports. "I'm calling it, 16-0. I don't think anybody can beat us as long as we stay healthy and do what we're supposed to do."

"You'll be lucky if we don't score 40 on you," Cleveland receiver Jarvis Landry told Sports Illustrated. "If we get everyone playing to their potential, we can win the Super Bowl this year."

That's especially brash talk coming out of Cleveland. And some Steelers think they know where that talk is coming from -- offensive coordinator Todd Haley.

Haley was not retained by Mike Tomlin at the end of last season despite the Steelers ranking third in total offense and eighth in scoring. That ended six years with the Steelers in which the team's offense became one of the most dangerous in the league but continually fell short of that goal of winning another Super Bowl.

In Haley's place is Randy Fichtner, and some feel the no-nonsense approach being taken this season is reflective of his more subdued personality.

"A lot of it is you take on the personality of your coordinator," receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey told me. "Todd was really big on points, which he should be. That’s his mentality and we followed suit. Randy, he’s a little different. We’re just making sure we take care of what we need to take care of and the points will come. But we’re not going to be saying, ‘We need to score 30 points per game.’ No, we need to win. Take care of the ball and just win games."

For a team that lost both of its games against the Jaguars last season in large part because it turned the ball over seven times in those meetings, that's big.

And, as DeCastro noted in the moments after that 45-42 playoff loss, giving the Jaguars extra motivation by openly talking about rematches with the Patriots, the Super Bowl and other things didn't help.

It also doesn't hurt that one of the main offenders, safety Mike Mitchell, is no longer with the team. But even Tomlin talked openly about a rematch with the Patriots in the playoffs with NBC's Tony Dungy before the two teams met in the regular season, a rematch that never happened.

But in this camp and preseason, nobody is talking about anything but the regular season opener in Cleveland Sept. 9.

"Talk is so cheap," DeCastro told me. "You guys need stuff to talk about and write about. I just kind of laugh about it. You see stuff on TV. I just want to play football. I get it. It’s a constant news cycle. People have short attention spans that need to be filled quickly with whatever it is they’re getting from it. But it’s just so useless. It’s like they’re living on a different planet sometimes."

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY