FOXBORO - Anthony Smith has some more guarantees for you.

There will be no more housing foreclosures. Gasoline will cost 99 cents a gallon by the end of the month. Osama bin Laden will realize the error of his ways and turn himself in to the CIA.

Outrageous? Ridiculous?

No more so than the second-year safety's brashly - and, as it turns out, erroneously and embarrassingly - guaranteeing the Steelers would beat the undefeated Patriots Sunday at Gillette Stadium.

Chocolate is not fattening. Guaranteed. It won't snow again in New England this winter. Guaranteed. Britney Spears will win a Grammy as top female vocalist. Either that, or she'll be named Mother of the Year. Guaranteed.

Hillary Clinton will be elected president and promptly cut taxes by 20 percent, across the board. And her husband, Bill, did not have sex with "that woman" -- meaning Monica, not Hillary.

There's about as much chance of those "guarantees" coming true as there was of the overmatched Steelers beating the fired-up Pats, who took notice of Smith's ill-chosen words - guaranteed.

"He's got to be smart with his words," Hines Ward, Pittsburgh's veteran wide receiver, said of young Mr. Smith. "When you're playing the best team in the NFL, you don't need to give them bulletin board stuff."

The Patriots, you may have noticed, make plays, not guarantees. They only thing the Pats guarantee is that they will show up for the game. Which, the way they're playing, is the same thing as guaranteeing a victory.

But they don't come out and say it, the way Smith did last week.

"When you guarantee you're going to win," said Steelers defensive end Brett Keisel, "it definitely affects how the other team approaches the game."

While the Patriots downplayed Smith's comments during the week, they took them to heart - and on the field with them - Sunday.

"They definitely did," said Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers' quarterback. "I heard a couple of their guys say to me during a TV timeout: 'Why was your guy mouthing off? We're fired up about it.' "

And what was Roethlisberger's response to those angry New England defenders?

"We've got some young guys," he replied.

Only 24, Smith hopefully will be become wiser as he gets older, although he gave no indication of that in his well-attended postgame interview.

"If we do what we're supposed to do," he said to the media throng gathered around his locker, "we're gonna be back here."

If the Steelers hope to return to New England next month for the AFC Championship Game, Smith is going to have to play much better than he did Sunday, when he was burned for two touchdowns, both involving Randy Moss.

On the Patriots' first play of the second quarter, Smith bit on a well-executed play-action fake by Tom Brady, who then threw a 63-yard touchdown pass to Moss, wide open behind the Steelers' secondary.

"It's tough," Smith said. "You've got to play the pass. But you've also got to come up and help with run support."

Smith and the Steelers were fooled again on the Patriots' first possession of the second half, when Brady threw a lateral to Moss, who, after dropping the ball, picked it up and threw back across the field to Brady. The quarterback then lofted a 56-yard scoring pass to Jabar Gaffney, who caught it a step behind Smith in the end zone.

"I almost got there," Smith said. "If I'd read it a second quicker, I could have made the play."

If the Patriots hadn't read Smith's ill-considered prediction, it might have made it easier on the Steelers.

"Him being young," Moss said, "and getting caught up in the hype of the game, something was bound to slip out. They did their talking throughout the week. We did our talking today."

"If we're going to talk the talk," Roethlisberger said, "we have to be able to walk the walk."

Instead, Smith's "guaranteed" win turned into a New England runaway.

Even the dour Bill Belichick smiled when asked about Smith's guarantee.

"You know," he said, "I think Rodney [Harrison] put it best, so I'll just leave it at that. But we've played against a lot better safeties than him, I'll tell you."

The way Harrison put it, when apprised of Smith's comments a few days ago, was: "Never heard of him."

Smith certainly heard from a number of Patriots on Sunday, although he claimed not to recall anything specific that they said.

"I talk a lot myself," said Smith, in what wasn't exactly a stop-the-presses revelation. "So it's hard to hear people when they're talking back to me."

Like Roger Clemens, who often claimed to be "misinterpretated" by the media when he was pitching for the Red Sox, Smith on Sunday said he hadn't been quoted correctly.

"If I'd been quoted right," he said, "people would have understood that what I said was: 'If we come out and do what we're supposed to do, we're going to win.' "

What happened instead was that the Patriots came out and did pretty much whatever they wanted to do against Smith and the Steelers.

"Because of what he said," Keisel said, "I think they decided to take a few shots at him. And the shots went their way. I think he learned his lesson."

Perhaps.

But Keisel wasn't willing to guarantee it.