By GENE COLLIER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

INDIANAPOLIS - Two weeks of polishing the NFL legends of Eli Manning and Tom Brady into modern gunslinger monuments might have seemed prudent for an unprecedented collision of Super Bowl MVPs, but the result wasn't terribly artistic until both quarterbacks finally drew their weapons late in a breathtaking Super Bowl.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Every funereal shade of gray in nature's catalog draped Penn State for the occasion of Joe Paterno's public memorial service, a perfectly lachrymose contrast to the brilliant colors of so many festive autumn Saturdays.

Tom Bradley finished packing up his office in the now-notorious Lasch Football Building last week, and walked away from the Penn State football program that had been his life for most of four decades.

Welcome again to the annual literary exercise in which we try to figure out exactly what our sports figures and broadcasters and writers are saying, particularly when they are merely trafficking in sports clichés.
Our Body of Work on this matter stretches back to 1984, when, in a full column-deadline panic, we strung together every sports cliché in the book and passed it off as legitimate socia

Once every last NFL club has waived bye-bye to its bye, once every last team has played exactly 10 games, then and only then should sane people even pretend they know who is going to the Super Bowl.

Generally, Super Bowl predictions are due the first week of July because that makes total sense. Never are they expected in late November because that would be stupid, right?

PITTSBURGH - What exactly will shake out Sunday at Heinz Field when the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots conduct their three-hour examination of each other's AFC worthiness is not easy to say, at least nowhere near as easy as identifying what you will not see.

HOUSTON - Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin chooses words more carefully and deploys them with a precision far superior to that of your average postgame soloist, so when he simultaneously invoked and then disparaged "mystical" Sunday, it validated every suspicion that he was coaching a team in serious trouble.

INDIANAPOLIS - The Indianapolis Colts galloped onto the carpet at Lucas Oil Stadium Sunday night to the thundering chords of a rock anthem by The Who, an interesting choice for a team with a starting lineup littered with names that triggered that very question:

Who?

BALTIMORE - On a positive note, the fellas on the Pittsburgh Steelers kickoff receiving team already have qualified for their 2011 varsity letters.

But even that came with a stinging slap of reality: When the opposition kicks off seven times, as the old NFL adage goes, you stink.

Like just another random flock of tech-obsessed gamers, the Pittsburgh Steelers will spend Sunday playing Angry Birds, but their hyper-specialized version promises to be a lot more painful.