Although Pittsburgh didn’t reach the Super Bowl 35 years ago, their wild-card win over AFC Central rival Houston had special meaning.
By virtue of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ loss on Saturday coupled with the Los Angeles Chargers’ Sunday win, the Steelers fell from the No. 5 playoff slot to the No. 6 seed. That’s bad news for the Steelers, because it means they’ll have to face the red-hot Baltimore Ravens in the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs. The seeding change is also disappointing for a sentimental reason: If the Steelers held onto the No. 5 seed, they would have played a wild-card game against the Houston Texans — and it would have been Pittsburgh’s first playoff game in Houston since Dec. 31, 1989.
Even though the Steelers aren’t going to Houston this week, it’s still worth looking back at the 35th anniversary of a memorably bitter matchup.
“That was one of the greatest memories in my career,” Merril Hoge, who played fullback for the Steelers from 1987-93, tells Athlon Sports.
The Steelers’ rivalry with the Houston Oilers began in the 1970s, when Pittsburgh won four Super Bowls in six years. The last two of those four titles came after the Steelers defeated Houston in back-to-back AFC Championship Games in the 1978 and ’79 seasons.
Neither team did much in the first half of the ’80s, but then the rivalry heated up again when the Oilers made Jerry Glanville their head coach in 1986. Glanville had a bad-boy reputation. More than just dressing in black and leaving tickets for Elvis at will call, Glanville had been accused of encouraging his players to take cheap shots that could injure opposing players. Glanville was the antithesis of stoic Chuck Noll, the Steelers’ Hall of Fame head coach.
Hoge called the 1989 playoff game “a three-year buildup of Chuck Noll and Jerry Glanville. You know, from what happened my rookie year (1987), when [Glanville] sent some players off at the sideline and they blindsided Frank Pollard, our running back. It just turned into a damn brawl.”
Noll confronted Glanville on the field after that game and things escalated from there. Steelers players were fiercely loyal to Noll — “I’d run through a wall for that dude,” said Hoge — but the team was struggling. In 1988, they finished 5-11, Noll’s worst season since his first year on the job in 1969.
In ’89, Pittsburgh turned it around with a 9-7 finish, but that included two losses to the Oilers, including a 27-0 beatdown in the Astrodome. Houston had been building momentum with Warren Moon at quarterback. The Oilers would host Pittsburgh in a wild-card meeting, and they were heavily favored.
The game was played on New Year’s Eve. The Steelers knew they were entering hostile territory. Between Moon’s high-powered offense and Glanville’s hard-hitting defense, the Astrodome was known as the House of Pain in those days. The Steelers were undaunted, however — fueled by their hatred for Glanville. Hoge recalled a clip the team saw before the game. Amazingly, the ’89 season was the only time Noll was named Coach of the Year. Glanville had been asked if he voted for Noll.
“He said, ‘Well, I voted for him, but I spelled his name K-N-O-L-L,’” Hoge said. “When we watched that, we're just like, you classless piece of s--t. You disrespectful piece of s--t. … The fury in us and the anger in us is for all the things that he kept doing.”
“The win actually wasn’t the thing that we were most excited about.”
Pittsburgh played inspired football, controlling the game with its ground attack and bend-but-don’t break defense. The Steelers had a 16-9 lead in the fourth quarter, but then Moon threw a pair of touchdowns to Ernest Givins to give Houston a 23-16 lead. With time winding down, Pittsburgh marched methodically down the field, and Hoge capped the drive with a 2-yard, game-tying touchdown run with 46 seconds left. The game was heading to overtime, where Gary Anderson hit a 50-yard field goal, his fourth of the game, to win it for the Steelers.
Pittsburgh was eliminated the following week, losing to the eventual AFC-champion Denver Broncos in Mile High Stadium, 24-23. Still, Hoge reiterates that the win in Houston was special. The Oilers, who had been a true Super Bowl contender going into the ’89 season, blew a chance to win their division by losing their last two games. Even though Glanville took Houston to the playoffs in three straight years, he was on thin ice.
Sure enough, Glanville was fired a few days after the game.
Hoge, who worked at ESPN for 21 years after concussions forced him to retire from the NFL in 1994, remains close to the Steelers. He still does scouting and film analysis for the team’s website and social channels.
The Steelers are limping into this year’s postseason, having lost four straight games to close the regular season. They did split their two games with the Ravens, but Hoge knows the rubber match in Baltimore will not be easy.
“Divisional games just take on a whole different element because of the familiarity,” said Hoge. “That being said, the Ravens are a more complete team. The Ravens don’t have a lot of weaknesses. They’re a championship-style team.”
When Hoge isn’t talking football these days, he’s on the road as a motivational speaker. And his story is certainly motivational. The final concussion that forced his retirement caused cardiac arrest — he flatlined in the training room, had to be resuscitated and spent two days in ICU. In 2003, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which has been in remission since chemotherapy. In 2015, he had open-heart surgery after it was discovered he had an enlarged aorta.
His experiences — and the challenge to overcome them — led him to find a mantra that became the title of his 2010 book, “Find a Way: Three Words That Saved My Life.”
“My main venture is speaking,” Hoge said. “Sharing the message of ‘Find a Way.’ The possibilities for us all, if we just learn to control our mind, versus our mind controlling us. When you can do that, anything's possible and you can overcome anything and become anything. So that's what I primarily am passionate about.”
Hoge continues to find a way, just as the Steelers found a way to dispatch Glanville and the Oilers 35 years ago.
