It's Steelers Week on the NFL Network!

Could it be any better, really? All Steelers, all the time. Features, Super Bowl replays, interviews, NFL Films... this may be the best week ever!

Right now I'm watching a film about the Steelers' 1978 season. I'm not old enough to remember it, but watching this I can't help but be wistful about what I missed. It's like a who's who of Hall of Famers, and when they stop focusing on the truly great players like Mel Blount, Lynn Swann, Terry Bradshaw, Jack Ham and Jack Lambert, they go to guys like Rocky Bleier, Randy Grossman, and a young Tony Dungy, who were merely fantastic.

That team was stacked. How they ever lost a game is incomprehensible to me. Every loss they took from 1974 until 1979 constituted a major upset. If the offense was poor the defense was indomitable. If the defense lagged the offense put up 30. It's simply incredible.

The sad part is that such a team can never exist again. There was a sea change in the relationship between players and owners in the 1970s in all sports. Free agency, something that had never truly existed thanks to something called the reserve clause, became the norm. In football it was limited thanks to the Rozelle Rule, which required compensation in the form of draft picks in exchange for any free-agent player, so for the duration of the '70s player transfers rarely happened, but now players move freely once they become unrestricted free agents. With every player looking for the big payday and the implementation of a salary cap, dominant teams simply cannot be held together for any extended period of time. The economics of the collective bargaining agreement simply won't allow it.

I'm sure it's better for the players, and for the fans of all the other teams who are sick of seeing their teams destroyed and humiliated year after year it's absolutely a good thing, but football just isn't the same. You could get behind a team and it would always be the same core players, like a family, people you grew up with and got comfortable with. Now such loyalty is rare, and teams shuffle players in and out like commodities.

Still, we have film, proof that such greatness existed. Without it, who would believe that great dynasties like the Packers of the '60s, the Steelers of the '70s, and the 49ers of the '80s were anything but mythology?