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Monday, December 11, 2000

By Gerry Dulac, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- Kordell Stewart wasn't anywhere near the Christmas shopping madness that enveloped New York City Saturday afternoon. He didn't dodge the wave of shopping bags or get in line with the thousands of people who waited to have their picture taken in front of the lighted tree at Rockefeller Center.

Kordell Stewart can't avoid linebacker Jessie Armstead, who registers one of the Giants' two sacks. (Peter Diana, Post-Gazette)

But Stewart discovered yesterday, before a crowd of 78,164 at Giants Stadium and a blitz-happy New York Giants defense, what it must have felt like to be walking down Madison Avenue amid the mass of Christmas shoppers.

Every time he looked, it seemed as if another blue shirt was coming at him in the pocket. And there was little doubt the Giants who were charging him were not filled with the Christmas spirit.

"They blitzed the crap out of us," said wide receiver Hines Ward.

It's not so much that Stewart was sacked or banged around in the 30-10 loss to the Giants that all but ended the Steelers' playoff chances. It was that the Giants kept bringing enough different players, and with such frequency, that Stewart was forced to make a lot of quick throws and his receivers had to cut short a lot of patterns.

That's why there were such strange-looking plays as the 7-yard pass to Courtney Hawkins on third-and-9 in the first quarter and the 5-yard pass to Ward on third-and-9 in the second quarter. Or the pass Stewart threw over the middle from his own 2 in which Bobby Shaw had to act more like a defensive back to keep Giants linebacker Michael Barrow from intercepting the ball.

The Giants did such a good job that Stewart was forced into a lot of hot reads, where quarterback and wide receiver have to be on the same page. When they're not, which is what happened on a cold, gray day not far from the Manhattan skyline, Stewart can look as accurate as a presidential ballot in Palm Beach County.

"They were coming from all over," Ward said. "It made a lot of our receivers break their routes short. Every pass was either a slant or a hitch."

"They were doing a lot of blitzing, bringing a lot of people, which makes us sight adjust," said Shaw, who finished with six catches for 88 yards and the Steelers' only touchdown, a 5-yard score with 1:04 remaining. "They were bringing more people than we could protect and we had to shorten our routes."

Nonetheless, Stewart had his most productive day, statistically, in more than two years, completing 20 of 34 attempts for 224 yards. It was his first 200-yard game since Oct. 10, 1999, against the Buffalo Bills (216) and the most passing yards he has compiled since Thanksgiving Day 1998, when he passed for 225 yards against the Detroit Lions.

"Every time we looked around, they were bringing one extra guy every single time," Stewart said. "One minute you have a guy open, the next minute you miss a guy, miss a pass or drop a pass. There were opportunities there and we didn't seize the moment."

It wasn't until the last possession of the game, with 64 seconds to play, that the Steelers finally seized the moment. By then, of course, the game was over.

	Kordell Stewart reacts after his pass was intercepted in the end zone. (Peter Diana, Post-Gazette)

Stewart completed five of his final six passes for 54 yards to produce the Steelers' only touchdown -- to Shaw, his fourth catch of the drive. From a production standpoint, it was a performance in stark contrast to Stewart's most recent outings, when he had produced nine touchdowns -- five passing, four running -- in the previous nine quarters.

"I think he did a pretty good job, considering they were bringing a lot of people," Shaw said of Stewart. "We had to get the ball out quick. It made us press a little more, caused us to do some of the things we hadn't been doing the past couple of weeks."

Stewart was asked if the Giants' game plan forced his receivers to cut off their routes.

"Sometimes it does. Other times, we have a call to stop us from being hot on one side. They were doing some things that, if we saw, we could have made some big plays. But we would have been throwing hot all day. This was a game where, when we had the opportunities, we had to capitalize on them. And that's what we didn't do."