By GENE COLLIER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

No matter what happens between here and the awarding of the Lombardi Trophy in the moonlight of some distant South Florida February, nothing will match for compelling NFL video the 15 stunning seconds of New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez eating a hot dog on the sideline the week before last.

From a highlights standpoint, I'm telling you, the season is over.

Sometimes you can't really appreciate how incompetent the Browns are until you see them in the flesh, and though the semi-annual appointment with the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday proved reliably that Cleveland's NFL entry is again comically bad, it was hard not to notice that the officials were funnier.

So even by the singular authority of those six Super Bowl championships, it appears as though the Pittsburgh Steelers will not be running the table in 2009, but at least they won't be tabling the run.

Not completely.

Tom Brady whipped 53 passes Monday night, one for each calendar week elapsed since his last pass of consequence, so it appears the New England Patriots did not have their franchise quarterback on anything approaching a rigid pitch count.

Not hardly.

Brady threw 53 times, Joe Flacco threw 43 times the day before, and Ben Roethlisberger threw 43 times three days before that.

Two weeks from now, in front of a nation's insatiable pro football audience, Mike Tomlin will begin his third season as the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers with nothing to accomplish that he hasn't already.

At 37.

There was a big scrimmage Thursday at Penn State, and while big scrimmage is assuredly a classical coach's oxymoron, the Nittany Lions are pretty desperate to see a couple of cornerbacks identify themselves as starters, joining safeties Drew Astorino and Nick Sukay in defensive coordinator Tom Bradley's remade secondary.

This is one of those things you might be thinking but generally don't express, as it carries with it an evident blasphemous component. It did not occur to me explicitly, but when it appeared in print from a reliably eloquent, consistently insightful correspondent, one Gordon Bloom, it looked an awful lot like the truth.

Keeping barely one eye on the sports world during a weeklong staycation can trigger some unconventional conclusions, like the one I came upon in light of stunning upset of Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps last week by an unheralded German in a polyurethane suit:

Clearly, its time that big-time swimming get its act together -- just have everyone swim naked.

What a very good thing it is that his luxuriant gift bag from the ESPYS included a pair of Quiet Comfort 3 Acoustic Noise Canceling Head Phones, because Ben Roethlisberger figures to be absorbing a ton of highly disagreeable noise over the coming weeks and months.

Sunday night brought the annual telecast of the ESPYS, which is just my way of saying, obviously, run for your lives, but in an oversight of truly staggering proportions, no ESPY will be awarded to Brett Favre.
There was an ESPY for Santonio Holmes.
There was an ESPY for skateboarding/snowboarding sensation Shaun White.
There was an ESPY for Nelson Mandela.