His fabled career might be encountering unexpected turbulence, might be losing altitude like a 757 in an air pocket, but some things are still coming easily to Ben Roethlisberger, among them the standard psychological gambit, the ready cliche, even the grasping theory on why things are suddenly not easy at all for one of the game's top guns.

They were all perfectly evident in yesterday's weekly two-minute drill with the media, and pretty much in that order:

The standard psychological gambit.

"What I'm going to do is what a lot of guys are going to do, we're going to start the season over right now," Ben said.

Uh-huh. Report immediately to Latrobe.

It'll be worth it just to see the look on the face of the 18-year-old divinity student from Punxsutawney when Casey Hampton moves that big screen HDTV into his room at Rooney Hall.

"We're 0-0 and lookin' for our first win," Ben said. "It's going to be good for everybody in terms of getting everybody on the same page."

OK, in their heads, they're unbeaten.

The ready cliche.

"There have been times when everything is going right, but there's always one play where it breaks down, one play that's killing us and biting us in the butt."

You'd think the forces dealing this team's apparent offensive fate would be content just to kill any imagined momentum without going all rump roast on them as well. Ben should know that, regionally, we're fine with the dead roaming the countryside and the mall feeding on living flesh, but the reverse zombification of the Steelers' offense is something else entirely.

We can see that 49 yards on 18 plays in the second half the other night carries with it the smell of AFC North death, but the bite marks in the buttocks are just uncalled for.

The grasping theory.

"Guys are rushing wide, trying to keep me in the pocket," Ben said of opposing defenses. "A lot of the big plays from my first two seasons came when I got out of the pocket."

That might be true, but I haven't noticed it. Marvel Smith, the tackle who protects Ben's blind side and has a slightly better angle on it than I, wasn't buying it either.

"I haven't seen anything specific like that," Smith said before practice yesterday. "I mean, it might be an emphasis for somebody, and he's made a lot of plays outside the pocket, but I haven't seen anything like [perimeter players rushing wide] specifically."

The other thing we haven't seen that we used to see with regularity is the perfectly thrown ball, the one like Philip Rivers lofted to Malcom Floyd in the corner of the Steelers end zone late in the first half Sunday night, the one that arrived at a spot to which only Floyd could ascend from his 6-5 launch site of a frame, which was 7 inches taller than that of defender Deshea Townsend.

Somehow this autumn, we've grown more familiar with balls thrown imperfectly, unadvisedly and ultimately into the hands of enemy agents. In his three starts this season, Roethlisberger has thrown nine interceptions. In the eight-game winning streak that culminated in a 21-10 victory in Super Bowl XL, he threw five. In five of those games, he threw none.

"It's hard to pinpoint; there's so much that goes into it," Bill Cowher said after what he generally termed a good practice. "There's the protection, the route, then the actual throwing of the football. He's just got to continue working with receivers to develop the kind of continuity that we had."

In San Diego, Ben's first picks came on a deep post off a flea flicker that was run badly by just about everyone but the offensive line, which was in the middle of a substandard performance that offered the quarterback little protection and the running game little foundation. Pulling to his right on a critical third-and-1, All-Pro Alan Faneca got pushed into Najeh Davenport, resulting in a 1-yard loss. The second Roethlisberger interception was almost exclusively a Roethlisberger production, although protection wasn't great then either.

"It starts with me," said the 24-year-old quarterback. "I have to make the adjustments, make the corrections."

Few thought we'd get to this point, where it's time to find out if No. 7 can make repairs as fast as he makes headlines.