First off, Pittsburgh safety Anthony Smith did not “guarantee” a Steelers victory over the Patriots. That was a creation by the press. Smith actually made a perfectly innocent statement in saying, “I guarantee we’ll win if” — emphasis mine — “we make our plays.” Any player before any game could say as much. Secondly, Smith should have kept his mouth shut and understood that anything he said before a game like this was going to be taken out of context. And thirdly, he should have understood that if newspapers quoted him on anything, the New England Patriots were going to make him pay. The sight of Smith frantically pursuing Patriots receivers Randy Moss and Jabar Gaffney on long touchdown passes stands as the lasting image for the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2007 season.

Actually, the idea that this was ever going to be a game in the first place was a press creation. Through their first 10 games, it might have looked as if the Steelers had a crack at beating the Patriots and winning the division. They had, after all, the league’s best defense, at least on paper, and in Ben Roethlisberger one of the two or three best passers in the league. But this edition of the Steelers is a team that finds ways to lose games it should not only win, but win handily, especially on the road. In their fourth game of the season, they lost, unforgivably, to a bad Arizona Cardinals team, 14–21. Two games later, they lost by a field goal to the equally unimposing Denver Broncos.

But any illusions that the Steelers were in a class with the Patriots should have been dispelled with their 19–16 overtime loss to the Jets on November 18. If that didn’t do it, then their 3–0 squeaker against the winless Miami Dolphins a week later should have been the wakeup call. After all, beating Miami 3–0 when you’re playing at home is as close as you can come to losing without actually losing.

Forget talent and potential: In consecutive weeks the Steelers, playing against two teams that had, otherwise, a combined 3–21 record, scored 19 points on offense and allowed 19 on defense. I can understand Smith’s confidence that his team could beat the Patriots; he’s paid to be confident. But how on earth, after watching the Steelers play the Jets and Dolphins, could so many experts get suckered in?

With 10 minutes to play in the third quarter, the Patriots pulled off a play that symbolizes the contemptuous ease with which they played all afternoon in the 34–13 victory. Tom Brady took the snap and fired a lateral to Moss, who had taken a step back from the line. Moss dropped the ball — a fumble, since the pass was a lateral — and then calmly scooped it up and threw it right back to Brady, who then lofted a long pass to Gaffney in the end zone. The Patriots don’t have to do things like this to win games: The bravado was just for anyone, the Colts or Cowboys in particular, who might happen to be watching. Brady and Moss looked like two camp counselors playing a game of touch with children.

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Playing the first half with their eyes on the Green Bay–Oakland game, and the second half as if they couldn’t wait to get back to the clubhouse to watch New England–Pittsburgh, the Dallas Cowboys weathered a sloppy, unfocused performance and still beat the Lions in Detroit yesterday, 28–27.

Exactly why the Lions played such inspired ball is a mystery: Going into the game at 6–6, they had little realistic chance of making the playoffs and evidently felt this was going to be their last big shot. Detroit came excruciatingly close to pulling off a major upset, and if the Lions had gotten a break on either of two plays, they would have done it. The first was a 35-yard field goal attempt by Jason Hanson with about nine minutes to play, but the ball missed the upright by about the width of Tony Romo’s grin. The second came late in the game when Lions linebacker Paris Lenon, who had apparently smeared Vaseline on his hands, couldn’t come up with a Romo fumble at midfield. It was recovered by guard Kyle Kosier who — wouldn’t you know it — is a former Lions player. On the next play, Romo converted a fourth down on a pass to Marion Barber. After they finish patting themselves on the back, the Cowboys would do well to study the numbers from this game and sort out what went wrong. They’d better start with their pass defense, which Lions quarterback Jon Kitna riddled with alarming frequency, 36 passes for 248 yards. The Lions came out throwing and spread the Cowboys’ defenders, allowing running back T.J. Duckett to bolt 32-yards up the middle in the first period. By the end of the quarter, the Lions were 10–0, and then 20–14 at the half, and finally 27–14 with just over four minutes in the third period.

After that, Detroit foolishly tried to eat up the clock on the ground. This never works in the NFL against a good team, but for some strange reason, defensive coordinators don’t seem to get it. The Cowboys, with perhaps the second best passing game in the league, made the opposite mistake, trying to run the ball early and leaving Romo under the threat of all-out third down blitzes on the Cowboys’ first three possessions.

It wasn’t until Dallas began passing on the first down late in the second quarter that they really got on track.

The success of the tactics a mediocre Detroit defense used on the Dallas passing game could be ominous. For most of the game, the Lions’ corners jammed Terrell Owens as often as they could and played man-to-man coverage on the other Dallas receivers. Just about every other defender blitzed except for a safety (usually on third and long) in the middle of the field.

Romo beat most of the blitzes — sort of — by throwing quick and short, but his final numbers look good only at a superficial glance: The man who had been leading the NFL in yards per throw going into this game got 302 yards against Detroit, but it took him 44 passes to do it, and his per throw average of 6.6 was actually less than Kitna’s 6.9.

It looked like the Cowboys were getting better over the last couple of weeks while the Patriots were slipping. Now, about all football analysts can do is start predicting how many points New England will be favored over Dallas in the Super Bowl.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”