OAKLAND, Calif. — Warren Sapp has been where the Pittsburgh Steelers are right now: a Super Bowl champion struggling to defend the title.

Three years ago, Sapp's Tampa Bay Buccaneers finished with a losing record after winning it all, unable to overcome all the distractions that come from being Super Bowl champions.

"I guess the egos would be the biggest thing," Sapp said. "Because you fight so long and so hard to get to that pinnacle. And once you get there, sometimes you lose sight of what it took for you to get to that point. Now you got to set aside that everybody has a car dealership, everybody has a commercial. Everybody's a superstar now. Everybody's a champion. So you just got to focus in on the things that took you to that championship. Sometimes that becomes difficult."

The Steelers (2-4) have their own problems as they come into Oakland to play Sapp's Raiders on Sunday. They've lost four of five games and are trying to avoid becoming the eighth Super Bowl champion to finish with a losing record the following season.

Sapp's Bucs were one of those teams, finishing 7-9 in 2003. Raiders coach Art Shell also experienced it as a player when Oakland followed its 1980 championship season with a 7-9 mark.

"The most difficult thing is that you can't relax and you can't think you can play like you played last year," Shell said. "You have to play better than you did last year because everybody is geared up for you. They watch every single tape from last year, game-planning you. ... They have the bull's-eye on your back and it's difficult."

That's something the Steelers have been dealing with this season. They've struggled to understand how a team like Jacksonville could shut them out one week and then give up 36 points to Washington and 27 to Houston.

Or how Atlanta managed to score 41 points against Pittsburgh with Michael Vick looking like a Pro Bowl passer a week after the Falcons scored just 14 in a sloppy performance against the Giants.

Now they face a Raiders team that's 1-5, but looking at this game as a way to validate themselves.

"We notice things like that," quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said. "We watch film and, obviously, check other games out, and you see how tough it was playing against a team and then you watch them the following week, or two weeks later, or three weeks later, and it's like, where was the team that we played?"

This has been a trying year for Roethlisberger, starting with his near-fatal offseason motorcycle accident and then the emergency appendectomy that knocked him out of the season opener.

Roethlisberger, who won 27 of his first 31 NFL career starts, had seven interceptions and no touchdown passes in his first three starts. But he's found his rhythm lately, completing 32 of 41 passes for 476 yards with five TDs the last two games before being knocked out with a concussion against the Falcons.

Roethlisberger is hoping to play Sunday, but the Steelers have the more-than-capable Charlie Batch ready if Big Ben can't go. Batch is 24-for-39 for 410 yards, five TDs and no interceptions.

No matter who plays quarterback, the Steelers can afford few more losses; it's likely they will need at least 10 wins to make the playoffs.

Pittsburgh struggled at times during its championship season, having a 7-5 record after 12 games. The Steelers finished the regular season by winning four straight, then swept through the playoffs with four away wins for the franchise's fifth Super Bowl title.

"But that was last year. That's the thing you have to be careful of, that when you do something like that ... you don't feel like that because we did it before we can do it again," coach Bill Cowher said. "You don't ever want to put yourselves in those situations."

Cowher said the biggest distraction this year was dealing with all the people congratulating the team and telling him and his players how good they are. That's not a problem anymore.

"We were able to eliminate that when we lost three games in a row," Cowher said. "We're not getting too many congratulations anymore, so we're back to where we need to be."