The biggest news for Super Bowl XLV betting players so far heading into the final days of preparation is the ankle injury to Pittsburgh’s Maurkice Pouncey, and we’re going to take a look at how his absence will affect the Steelers’ chances of winning their seventh Super Bowl. Pouncey is a stud at center, a position that the Steelers place a high premium on as they’ve had two legendary players man that spot, Dermontti Dawson and Mike Webster, who went to the Hall of Fame in 1997 (Dawson was an HOF finalist in 2009). Pouncey was a freshman All-American at Florida, and he was also an All-American in his junior year as a part of the Florida team that won the national championship. This year as a rookie, Pouncey made the Pro Bowl and was named a second-team All-Pro after starting every game in the middle of the Pittsburgh offensive line, and he’s built a rapport with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. NFL playoff betting players know that the relationship between a quarterback and his center is one of the most underrated factors in the game of football, as the play doesn’t start until there is a clean exchange at the snap. Pouncey was a first-round NFL pick because of his ability to make the quarterback’s job as easy as possible, and we saw how much of a problem it was when Pouncey went down in the first half of the Steelers’ AFC title win over the New York Jets with an ankle injury, which was once believed to be sprained but has been found to be broken. Doug Legursky came in to replace Pouncey and there were a couple of poor exchanges, one of which led to a safety in the fourth quarter of a tight game. This is no intentional knock on Legursky, who was undrafted out of Marshall and has bounced in and out of the Pittsburgh lineup over the past couple of years, but he is just not in the same league as Pouncey. Legursky is more of a jack-of-all trades who basically stayed on the roster this year because of all the injuries to the Steelers’ offensive line. Pouncey is comfortable making all of the line calls for the Steelers’ line, and as we said, Roethlisberger is comfortable with Pouncey. This could be a reason that the line won’t move towards the Steelers for the Super Bowl, and it may even drop if reports come out stating that Roethlisberger and Legursky are having problems in practice. We don’t want to make this a big deal, but we can’t understate the importance of the quarterback/center relationship, and it definitely could affect Pittsburgh’s sports betting odds on Sunday.
