More than eight years ago, the Tennessee Titans sealed the No. 1 seed in their conference by winning a showdown with the Steelers, the other candidate to secure home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs. In their exuberance, however, the Titans took things too far, desecrating the Terrible Towel.
The Titans promptly lost to the Ravens in the divisional round, the Steelers won the Super Bowl, and talk emerged of a Terrible Towel curse. And in the eight seasons since 2008, the Titans haven’t made it back to the playoffs.
So now with Nashville’s hockey team facing Pittsburgh’s in the Stanley Cup Final, a question arises: Is the curse transferable from football to hockey?
If that seems like a stretch, it is. But I needed to have some way to tie the two sports together, and to justify the posting of Monday’s PFT Live segment with NBC’s Pierre McGuire regarding Game One of the Stanley Cup Final, which starts tonight on NBC at 8:00 p.m. ET, with coverage for an hour before that on NBC and more coverage another hour before that on NBCSN.