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Sporting News, The, Feb 5, 1996 by Michael Knisley

In the mad moments immediately after Super Bowl XXX, the little coaches' comer in the Steelers' locker room gave Dick Lebeau his first chance for some quiet reflection. There, in something of an oasis amidst the desert swarm of postmortems, 1989 first crossed his mind.

49ers 20, Bengals 16. Super Bowl XXIII. Lereau's first Super Bowl loss as a defensive coordinator. Joe Montana to John Taylor with 34 seconds to play. He was that close.

But in that one, Lebeau's defense played the game hanging by a string. In that one, the 49ers racked up 454 yards of total offense. In that one, the Bengals bent and bent and bent before they broke in the final minute.

In this one, Lebeau's defense barely flinched. In this one, the Steelers didn't give an inch to Emmitt Smith and Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin and the Sumo wrestlers on the Cowboys' offensive line. In this one, Lebeau was in many ways even closer, despite the 10-point margin of the Cowboys' victory.

Only once previously in the 30 years of Super Bowls has the winning team gained fewer yards than the 254 Dallas gained in Sunday's 27-17 victory. That came in 1973, when the Dolphins managed only 253 yards in a 14-7 victory over the Redskins.

So Lebeau knows what might have been, were it not for the failings of the Steelers' offense, were it not for a pair of Neil O'Donnell interceptions.

Lebeau knows close.

"We were clearly outplaying them with maybe five minutes to go in the game," he says. "Yeah. We were close again. They were having a hard time with us."

And so the Cowboys are human, after all. They can be given a hard time, even if they are the NFL champs again, for the third time in the past four years. They can be given a hard time, in particular, by the wizardry of Lebeau's zone-blitz defensive package, the same package that kept the Bengals close to the 49ers seven years ago.

The concepts of the zone blitz, which combines pressure on the quarterback with safer zone coverages in the secondary, have been adopted in part by most NFL teams since the mid-1980s, when Lebeau's Bengals began using it. But after last Sunday, it will be a very common denominator.

The Steelers started spreading the news a year ago by unleashing it on opposing quarterbacks and passing games -- a league-leading 55 sacks in a reign of terror that stopped just short of last year's Super Bowl. Against the Cowboys, they unleashed it on the game's best running attack in a reign of terror that stopped just short of this year's Super Bowl championship.

Smith, who gained 1,773 yards in the regular season and won his fourth rushing title in the last six years, ran for 49 against Pittsburgh. Me Cowboys had a total of 56 yards on the ground.

"I thought our defensive line controlled their offensive fine," outside finebacker Kevin Greene says. "Everything I heard last week was that their offensive line was going i crush us. And they didn't. It went the other way. Our defensive fine dominated. Everybody had this idea that Emmitt was going to run all over us. It didn't happen."

So when the Cowboys take the field again this fall, they can figure on being fed a steady diet of the gap-control run blitzes Lebeau used to snuff the rush.

This is what Dallas will see next season. This is what Dallas saw last Sunday.

"You commit your front people into the gaps," says Panthers Coach Dom Capers, Lebeau's predecessor as defensive coordinator. "You either cross them or you send them into the gap they're fined up in, but you penetrate the gaps with either a linebacker or a safety stacked in behind them to be a cleanup hitter. You try to force the issue that way, to get people upfield and penetrate. And then you have a guy who is going to kind of just roam in behind them to clean up if the ball-carrier happens to have a gap to cut back in."

Inside linebacker Levon Kirkland did most of the penetrating, to the tune of eight solo and 10 total tackles. Safeties Darren Perry and Myron Bell did most of the clean-up hitting.

"We were effective in mixing up our pressures and throwing them for negative yardage," Lebeau says. 'Once our guys got figured into what they were doing with their blocking schemes, we started penetrating pretty good. They were our zone pressures."

If you're the Steelers -- if you have Kirkland and Chad Brown at inside linebacker, and Greene and Greg LLoyd at outside linebacker -- you do an that even though the gaps in the Cowboys' gargantuan offensive fine are oh-so-slender. Pittsburgh's defense stared through Dallas's widebodies, the 300-pounders -- Mark Tuinei, Nate Newton, Derek Kennard, Larry Allen and Erik Williams--and found the gaps to fill.

Without gimmickry. The Steelers did nothing out of the ordinary -- out of their ordinary, anyway -- against the Cowboys.

"Y'all are the ones that put Emmitt up on that pedestal," Steelers defensive end Brentson Buckner says, with a sweeping gesture toward the assembled media. "Emmitt is good. I'm not taking anything from him. But that Super man image y'all gave their offensive line and Emmitt...the press created that Y'all put'em up on the pedestal. Y'all created this monster, because y'all thought the big, bad Dallas Cowboys offensive line would come in here and ran all over the Steelers. But we fined up and just played 'em man for man, and we didn't do anything special. We just played Steelers defense, and we shut them down. We ran the base defense we ran all year long."