Dick LeBeau is one of pro football’s career NCOs – football’s equivalent of Burt Lancaster’s Sgt. Warden in From Here to Eternity, guys who are just not cut out to be officers. LeBeau turned 68 this past September and has no realistic expectations of becoming a head coach again. (He went 12-33 in just under three seasons with Cincinnati from 2000-02 in his only stint as top man.) Now, in his second year with the Steelers as defensive coordinator, LeBeau has finally discovered the job God put him on earth to do.

LeBeau is the inventor of the zone blitz, the favorite football buzz term of the 2006 postseason. Actually, LeBeau didn’t invent it: turn-of-the-century guru Amos Alonzo Stagg did, or if not him, somebody he coached with or against. Nothing in football is new except to those who haven’t seen it before, and the zone blitz has been away long enough to have escaped the game films that Pittsburgh’s recent opponents have on file.

If you don’t like football jargon, all the zone blitz really means is that the guys you might expect to be on the line rushing the passer, like linemen, drop back into the short passing routes, and the guys who you’d normally expect to be in those short pass routes, the linebackers, are rush the passer. All the while, safeties like the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu – you know, the guy with more hair than Bob Marley and all of his Wailers combined – are either back helping the linemen cover the pass, helping the linebackers rush the passer, or somewhere in between.

I could lie to you like the guys you hear pontificating on TV and pretend I know which player covers which spot in which situation depending on whether the right offensive tackle twitches his left ear. But the truth is I don’t really know what, specifically, LeBeau has in store for the Seattle Seahawks this Sunday in Super Bowl XL. Maybe quarterback Ben Roethlisberger will line up at left tackle and drop back as a strong safety.

In the second round of the playoffs, LeBeau’s defense contained Peyton Manning and the NFL’s best passing – on the Colts’ home field, no less. The following week, it stuffed Mike Anderson and the best running game in the league – in Denver.

This Sunday, LeBeau and the Steelers defense face a stern test from a balanced Seattle attack armed with football’s best runner, Shaun Alexander, and the league’s most improved passer, Matt Hasselbeck (fourth in the NFL’s quarterback rating at 98.2). The Seahawks are very good, but they can’t show the Steelers anything they haven’t seen already, whereas LeBeau almost certainly has a few tricks to show the Seahawks that they haven’t dreamt of.

The unpleasant fact for Seahawks fans is that in beating the Colts and Broncos, the Steelers have already triumphed over two teams better than Seattle. That the numbers don’t quickly make this apparent shows how deceptive glancing at numbers can be.

For one thing, Seattle’s overall record of 15-3 is not, viewed from the right perspective, any more impressive than Pitttsburgh’s 14-5. The Steelers played four games without Roethlisberger and lost two of them by a total of nine points. Moreover, the Steelers have faced much tougher competition in the second half of the season and through the postseason. Seattle’s 11-game winning streak from October 9 through Christmas Eve was certainly impressive, but outside of the meaningless match with the demoralized Colts in Week 16, there was only one game against a playoff team in the bunch, and the Seahawks won that one (at Seattle on November 27) only because Giants kicker Jay Feely, supplying material for grateful Saturday Night Live writers, missed three field goals in within about 10 minutes.

From their 37-31 victory over St. Louis in Week 5 through their 28-24 win over Tennessee nine games later, the Seahawks faced only two teams with winning records – the Cowboys and the Giants – and beat them by a combined six points. Their two postseason victims, Washington and Carolina, were a combined 23-11 (including the postseason).

In contrast, the Steelers wound down the season by defeating two good teams in December – Chicago and Minnesota (excluding their games with Pittsburgh, a combined 20-10) – then whipped the Colts and Broncos, who were a combined 27-6 up to that point. (I’m not counting the Steelers’ first round victory over Cincinnati since Carson Palmer’s early injury prevented it from being a true test.)

More relevant than this, though, is that the Steelers’ defensive statistics were compiled against better offensive opponents than the Seahawks. Seattle faced just two passers rated in the NFL’s top 10 all season: the Rams’ Marc Bulger (no. 5), twice, and Jacksonville’s Byron Leftwich (no. 9), who beat them 26-14 on opening day. The Steelers’ defense, in contrast, has faced Peyton Manning (no. 1), Carson Palmer (no. 2), twice, Tom Brady, (no. 6), Jake Plummer (no. 7), and Drew Brees (no. 10). So when I tell you the Steelers have allowed just 6.4 yards per throw in their 19 games to Seattle’s 6.7 in their 18 games, you should understand that the Steelers’ edge is even bigger than that.

Matt Hasselbeck is a fine quarterback, but he’s also 30 years old, and he hasn’t shown any indications of greatness before this season. He does exactly what his head coach, Mile Holmgren, tells him to do, and that’s usually enough to win. But Holmgren himself is something of an underachiever. In the 1998 Super Bowl, his heavily favored Green Bay Packers were outsmarted and out-finessed by Mike Shanahan’s Broncos. In the 1997 Super Bowl against what should have been an overmatched New England defense, he put such tight reins on quarterback Brett Favre that the Packers needed a late kickoff return from Desmond Howard to break things open. Favre was allowed to throw only two passes the entire game longer than 35 yards – both went for touchdowns. Hasselbeck, of course, doesn’t throw nearly as well as Favre.

Don’t expect Holmgren to turn Hasselbeck loose for this game, or for it to mean all that much if he does. The Steelers, on the other hand, have, in Roethlisberger, a quarterback on the verge of greatness and a philosophy of striking early. Roethlisberger averaged an amazing 8.9 yards per throw during the regular season and 8.6 in three playoff games. Combine that with the Steelers’ low yield of yards per throw on defense, and it looks like bad news for Seattle.

Here’s more bad news: The Seahawks’ weakest link is their downfield pass defense.

It’s fairly obvious that Steelers coach Bill Cowher will let his quarterback do what he has to do to give his team an early lead. This will make LeBeau’s job that much easier, forcing Seattle to play come-from-behind ball and limiting the number of opportunities the Seahawks will have to run with Alexander. It also plays into Pittsburgh’s pass rushing advantage: The Steelers have sacked opposing quarterbacks 12 times in the postseason – three times as many as the Seahawks.

Expect the Steelers to score the way they vote in Chicago, early and often. Expect the Steelers’ pass rush to get stronger as the game goes on. Most of all, expect the unexpected from Dick LeBeau’s defense.

The Pick: Steelers

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