This team clearly isn’t the 2008 Steelers – but why?

One of the things that had people so excited about this year’s team is the fact that there were not very many personnel changes from last season’s championship team.  I think that the general feeling was that we would just continue on from where we left off, and that consequently we would be unstoppable.  And therein lies the fallacy that fools choral conductors, and possibly football coaches, every time.  

I have struggled with this mindset for many years.  Since I conduct a “grownup” choir, rather than a high school or college choir that is by necessity going to have significant turnover every year, I tend to have a relatively stable group of singers.  This season was perhaps the best ever that way – I lost 3 singers, but because of various  circumstances during the previous season I had been slightly over our usual 24, and so I shifted one singer to a slightly different position, added one new singer, and voila, I had essentially the same roster as last season.  Naturally we would start right where we left off, and have our best season ever!  

Except that it hasn’t quite happened that way.  We had our own November mini-meltdown.  I’m happy to say that we took a long, hard look at what was going on, adjusted some of the coaching/preparation, called the troops to arms, and in fact managed to give perhaps our best first concert ever, at least during my tenure.  But this just illustrates how easy it is for things to go awry.

So what happened in November, both to my choir and the Steelers?  Was it a function of some of the factors that have been discussed endlessly in this and other blogs?  Let’s examine them:

1. 1. Overconfidence:  The Steelers won the Superbowl.  It doesn’t get any better than that.  You are “The World-Champions.”  (I’ve often wondered whether the rest of the world notices, but that’s a subject for another time.)  You’ve just had a parade in which 350,000-odd people, some of them odder than others, have turned out to crown you as demi-gods. In the case of my choir, we didn’t have any ticker-tape parades, and our total audience over the past 35 years we have been in existence has not been anywhere near 350,000 people, despite the huge boost we got from singing at the Browns game last December.  But we got a lot of nice feedback, a couple of good reviews, and as musicians we could say that while we weren’t perfect, we were much improved, and performed at a very high level.
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3. 2. Age:  I’ve seen a number of the veteran players accused of being past their prime.  Is this part of the problem?  Do I see the same difficulty in my chorus?
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5. 3. Desire:  I’ve seen an awful lot of comments about this.  Do the Steelers really have a fire in the belly, or are they just coasting on last year’s success?  (Also see Overconfidence.)  Was that a factor with my singers?  
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7. 4. Coaching:  A mere 2 words that can raise a firestorm in Steeler Nation – Bruce Arians. Is this a coaching problem?  And is the inconsistency in my choir a result of bad coaching on my part?
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9. 5. And finally, the locker room.  Is there some major rift that has occurred?  Have Ben’s legal issues, or whatever else is going on in the other players’ lives, finally caught up with them?  Can we by any chance pin this on Tiger Woods?  (If only…)  Are we going to start seeing fingers pointed?  What about in a chorus?  Are there unresolved personal issues between singers that are causing problems?

Well, I’ve raised the questions – I can’t think of anything else offhand that I’ve seen mentioned as a possible factor in the Grand Canyon of Steeler Suckage.  So I, as always, will present my answers, if I have any.

1. 1. Overconfidence:  Certainly the Steelers had every reason to be confident coming into this season.  Were they overconfident? I guess that it might be difficult to not believe your own PR hype.  The question is, is confidence a good thing or a bad one?  I would argue that too little confidence is quite a bad thing.  You need to feel as if you are capable of performing the task set before you, whether it is beating another football team or not screwing up a piece of Poulenc.  The problem with overconfidence is when it affects the amount of preparation and effort that you put into what you do.  I recently read Geoff Colvin’s “Talent is Overrated: What really separates world-class performers from the rest of us.”  (Ironically, one of his ‘case studies’ is Tiger Woods.)  I’m not sure I totally agree with his premise (which is, basically, that talent is not only overrated but essentially non-existent.) However, he makes some very interesting points about the sort of preparation that leads to ‘world-class performance’, which he calls “deliberate practice.” The two points that stand out to me is that deliberate practice is highly demanding mentally, and isn’t much fun.  If he is correct about that (and I believe that he is) then you can see why people who feel that they have reached some sort of pinnacle of achievement might be tempted to cut themselves some slack.  The trouble is, you can’t stay on a pinnacle.  You’re either going backward or forward.   I think it is telling that the player that everyone seems to agree has made the most difference this year, as demonstrated by his loss, is Troy Polamalu.  I wouldn’t want to say that no one else on the team works as hard as he does, but I think it is abundantly clear that no one works harder.  It is easy to say that one is never satisfied, and infinitely harder to work as if that were true.
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3. 2. Age can mean that you are more experienced, more savvy, and can elevate your game.  But, given that NFL years are sort of like dog years – they are probably the equivalent of 7 normal human years in terms of the physical toll they take – the difference between the peak and the decline might be razor-thin.  This might be part of what we are seeing in the “origami curtain.”  For singers, not so much.  Theoretically I should get a good many years out of a singer before the disadvantages of age trump the advantages.  One of my singers has been with the group since 1982, and she’s still an asset.  But yes, age is potentially a factor, especially if it is combined with other problems, in particular lack of physical conditioning.  (This may surprise some of you who only sing in the shower, but singing well takes a lot of breath control and a reasonable degree of toughness.)
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5. 3. Did/do the Steelers not want to win badly enough?  Did my singers not care enough?  I’m pretty sure that none of my singers would say that is the case.  Since they don’t sing for a living, they give up a considerable amount of free time to be a part of the group.  Would the Steelers say that?  Not in public, although they might in private – a young lady of my acquaintance was an auditor of a private conversation between some of the players in November of 2006, and they speculated as much.  But whether they believe that is a factor or not, it may well be.  The problem is, whenever you’re dealing with people, you have to allow for the perspective issue, as in “That guy over there is lazy, my friend is insufficiently motivated, and I’m doing my best in seriously adverse circumstances.”  It’s easy to see the flaws in other people’s performance and/or preparation, and to overlook the shortcomings in your own. But in the end the results are heavily dependant upon the preparation and effort of each individual on the roster.
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7. 4. So is it a coaching issue? I personally think it’s somewhat unfair, but a lot of people would like to hang all the problems on the coaching, particularly Arians.  Obviously the coaching staff has to take some blame for this – it’s their job, after all.  But they aren’t the ones actually playing the game.  I’m not sure it would ever be possible to tease out how much should be laid at their feet and what is out of their control.  In terms of a chorus, I think that it is actually more reasonable to hang problems on the “coach,” as, unlike in football, we’re actually on the field, and therefore have a more direct effect on the actual performance.  Once I stopped saying “you people have to work harder” and started working harder myself, things took a turn for the better.  Of course, sometimes it isn’t a matter of working harder – as in doing what you were doing before, only more of it – sometimes you have to recalculate, or even start from scratch.  But it is almost impossible to judge that from the outside, I think.
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9. 5. And how about the locker room?  Well, all I can say is that when you put together a diverse group of people with possibly only one thing in common, it is easy for small problems to get blown up into big ones.  But my singers don’t have to live with one another day in and day out – we just see each other once a week during most of the season.  Furthermore, trust me, there’s no big money involved.  It may be the love of money, rather than money itself, that is the root of all evil, but money can cause a lot of problems, which I suppose means that musicians should be the most trouble-free people on the planet.  In circumstances where you are cheek-by-jowl day in and day out (like, say, a football team) I would presume that locker room issues could turn into a major problem.

So what’s my conclusion?  I have no way of knowing, but I’m guessing that the problem with this year's Steelers is a systemic problem, and that all of the above factors figure in to one degree or another.  As to my choir, I am lucky in a couple of ways – for one, music isn’t a competitive sport (although one is competing for funding and audience, I suppose.)  I also don’t have to throw my team out to the spotlight weekly – my first concert was in December, which gave me time to address problems before they showed up as a drop in performance.  On the other hand, the ‘draft picks’ I have are from a small geographical area, I don’t have training camp, and I see the singers once a week for 2½ hours, so I'm not letting the Steelers off the hook.  

And as to why it doesn’t seem possible to pick up where you left off, I think that we can look to the Butterfly Effect.  So let’s send out a crew to Africa and take out all of those dang butterflies!  Well, actually, what I mean is that even seemingly insignificant changes alter the chemistry of an organization, and everything spirals from there.  In other words, it is a myth that you can ever have the exact same team, or choir, in subsequent seasons, even if everything appears to be exactly the same.

Finally, my heart goes out to the team, and I hope that we can all, while holding them to a high set of expectations, also let them know that we are there for them in good times and in bad.  As many have stated, no team can win every year, but I do hope that they can finish the season with some semblance of self-respect, even if they don’t win another game.  

As always, I would appreciate any light that anyone else can throw on these questions.