The Seattle Seahawks visit the Pittsburgh Steelers at Heinz Field on Sunday at 1:00. The game will be televised on CBS. Despite the Steelers' awful Week 1 performance against the Baltimore Ravens, their Week 2 game isn't expected to be a particularly close one, and the reasons are obvious: the Seahawks are a bad team with an unsettled quarterback situation. (Tavaris Jackson threw for 197 yards on 37 attempts in Week 1 against the 49ers.)
The Steelers are 14-point favorites against the Seahawks. But they're talking about staying focused and not being lackadaisical in their approach.
"We need to focus on where we are this year," [Ryan] Clark said. "Somebody posed the question of 'How do you get better when you know you are better than this?' How do we know? This is the 2011 version of the Steelers so far. We're 0-1, and what we did last year doesn't count."
It sounds like the Steelers view this week as primarily a fight against themselves.
"I got confidence in every guy in this locker room, every guy on defense, I'm not worried about nobody," Casey Hampton insisted shortly after the Ravens dropped 35 points, 170 yards rushing and three touchdowns passing on them Sunday. "The answer is with us. The answer is not outside this locker room, the answer is with us, so that's the good thing."
Expect the Steelers to come out fighting after such an ugly loss. They'll have something to prove, and in all likelihood, they'll do it against the Seahawks. If they don't, well, the Steelers' season could be in serious trouble.
For more on the Steelers, check out Behind The Steel Curtain.