Atlanta Falcons @ Pittsburgh Steelers Sun. Sept. 12^th 1pm EST

Last season the Pittsburgh Steelers came into the year as the defending Super Bowl champions and extremely confident they could repeat as they had relatively the same team intact, but despite having confidence in their title defense, a knee injury to superstar safety Troy Polamalu was enough to bring everything crashing down.

Starting off the season as underdogs, the Steelers are -2 as set by the odds of BetUs, one of the leading USA online sportsbooks on the Web.

After Polamalu went down with knee injury that kept him out the majority of the season, the Pittsburgh Steelers stood no chance against teams looking to expose the flaw in their defense.

This season the Steelers will look to get back to championship form, but they will have to get through at least the first four games of the season without their two-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Ben Roethlisberger due to suspension for violating the person conduct policy.

Fortunately, head coach Mike Tomlin will have an up and coming quarterback Dennis Dixon (Oregon) to fill in for Big Ben while he finishes out his suspension. Even though Dixon needs some help with his passing ability, the young quarterback has wheels that resemble a younger Michael Vick.

As for the Atlanta Falcons, they will head into their first regular season game looking to get back on track as one of the most promising teams in the NFC Conference. Matt Ryan and company may play in the same division as the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints, but they have a great chance of being playoff bound this season as they finally have their three best players (Matt Ryan, Roddy White and Michael Turner) back healthy and ready to compete once again.

Even though the Pittsburgh Steelers have great chance of getting back to form this season, I believe the first four games without Big Ben will be rough, especially in Week 1 against the Atlanta Falcons.

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