Eight Ballers correctly predicted 11 wins for the Steelers: copanut, steelerfan58, chicosteelersfan, tompaulbillybob, malsor, writersrock, tuskegee_brown, and bgintn. Saneman also predicted 11 wins although the entry was late and lacked tiebreakers.
Of these eight, four also correctly predicted 10 wins for the Bengals: copanut, steelerfan58, writersrock, and bgintn.
Of these four, none correctly predicted either the Ravens or Browns. Steelerfan58 and bgintn were closest with 8 wins for the Ravens and 6 for the Browns. Mack was similarly close overall but missed on the Steelers which is the most important prediction.
Late breaking change: Because of the Bengals tie, tuskegee_brown is equally close on their record as he predicted 11 wins for them. He was also closer on the Browns pick than steelerfan58 or bgintn. Therefore….
So…. Baller honors this year go to steelerfan58, bgintin, and tuskegee_brown in a tie. Well done, gentlemen.
5. Membership is free and is intended to stay that way. There aren’t too many places on the internet (or anywhere else for that matter) where you can pursue your interests without having advertisements forced into your face at every turn or someone dipping into your pocket. It’s nice to have a no-marketing zone, since we surely get our fill during actual football games.
4. We don’t censor our members. The site is administered, not moderated. We treat each other like adults, meaning we understand that this is all in good fun. As long as we behave in a manner consistent with the basic rules of the site, we can express ourselves freely. We have a private posting mechanism for content that “pushes the envelope”. There are two basic levels of membership – subscribers and authors. Authors are able to post original content. Currently we have about 20 different authors and really anyone interested in participating at that level only has to ask. What other Steelers site has such an open policy?
3. This site is about the members, not about fulfilling the ego of the site owner or pushing the agenda of a media organization, any corporations, or even the Steelers themselves. Everyone is treated equally. In fact, you don’t need to be a member at all in order to participate in the chat (although membership is strongly encouraged). Our members are not Pittsburgh-centric, and in fact very few members reside in Pittsburgh. As shown in the SB Nation map, we have members all across the United States and even at least one active member in the UK. Furthermore, our members are some of the most intelligent and knowledgeable fans that you will find. Members often disagree with one another, but their reasoning is clearly stated. Our members tend to be a little bit older and a little bit wiser than what you might encounter in the Dawg Pound.
2. The Sound Off chat is the central purpose of the site, for casual interactive discussion among members rather than just articles by one or two restricted authors. No other Steelers site, so far as I know, features an open chat forum. They all have post and comment sections, and that’s great and appreciated, but the unique nature of interactive chat can only be found here. That is our raison d’etre – once the Post Gazette decided to kill off the PG+ chat forum, there was nowhere to go until we formed this site.
1. Steel Balls is a very convenient clearinghouse for Steelers information. So far as I’ve seen, no other site provides live feeds consolidating current news from various Steelers sources, including the Steelers official feed, the Post Gazette feed, and the great blog Steelers Depot, among others. Other sites provide a list of links to other sites, but not the live feed. This makes it easy to keep up with the latest posts on various sites without having to go to those sites first. The “Other Interesting Places” section can then focus on non-blog information sources that are very useful for analysis and discussion, like Pro Football Reference and the NFL Arrests Database. That way, you don’t have to clog up your browser with a bunch of bookmarks, and this list can continue to evolve as new sources emerge without everyone having to keep their own bookmark list. People may also find the various “Tweets of Steel” interesting, as well as the archive of Post Gazette chat sessions with Ed Bouchette, Gerry Dulac, and Ray Fittipaldo. Furthermore, our members keep coming up with new things to add, such as the recently added Steelers Nation Radio. In short, we’re trying to be a one stop source for all of the various Steelers related news and information sites.
Bonus reason: I like seeing those six steel balls at the top of the page every day, and hope to see a seventh added soon.
So what do you think? Why do you like this site? What is missing that you’d like to see?
What with all the World Cup hype these days and the dearth of gridiron news, much of the sporting world is expending energy on the periodic debate about which game is rightfully called football. The discussion usually goes something like this:
FIFA Announcer: “And the US have lost another bid to be taken seriously in the world of football…”
Yank: “To hell with it. It’s not real football anyway.”
Brit: “Bloody ‘ell, ‘ow can you lot call what you do football when your feet never touch the bloomin’ ball?” *
Yank: “Shows what you know, limey. We have kickoffs, punts, and field goals all using the foot.”
Kraut: “Ja, but only vun playah on za team can use za foot, und he is un object uff ridicule.”
Yank: “At least we aren’t a bunch of pansies flopping all over the field faking injuries and crying over stubbed toes.”
Frog: “Pfffffft… ah la la la, you Americans make my ass tweetch, hawh hawh.”
Aussie: “Mate, if you want to play a man’s game, you should try Aussie rules. We could eat your boys for breakfast. Crikey.”
Brit: “Blimey, rugby is what real men play when they can’t find a proper futbol, whut?”
(* Apologies to Steeltyke for this crude caricature.)
As it happens, there are a half dozen vastly different sports that are all referred to as football depending on who you ask, including: American rules (gridiron), Canadian rules, Association rules (soccer), Australian rules, Rugby, and International rules.
So what is real football? It turns out that all of these various games, and others besides, derive from a common ancestor game in medieval Europe that involved moving an inflated pig bladder back and forth across a designated contested area. Various means were used to move the object, including not just feet, but also hands and other body parts. The reason it was called football, apparently, had nothing to do with being required to move the ball with the feet as soccer purists might claim, but rather to distinguish it from the horseback sports played by the aristocracy that were beyond the means of mere commoners. Football was always a blue collar endeavor (or, to be more accurate to the time period, perhaps we should say “a shit, urine, and sweat stained tunic endeavor”). The name football also served to distinguish the sport as a contrast to activities involving propulsion of an object with something other than the human body, such as a bat, mallet, bow, gun, sling, racket, or club. In short, to play the game you only needed to be able to move around on your feet and to have the appropriate ball available. No special equipment was required.
The ancestral football sport evolved in different ways in different regions, and independent rules or codes were developed accordingly. The Rugby School (in Rugby, England) developed Rugby rules in 1845 from which modern variants of football arose or diverged. These rules included various means of propelling the ball including both hands and feet. Cambridge rules (1848) also included both hands and feet as did Australian rules (1859). Sheffield rules (1857) introduced restrictions that are more recognized as modern soccer, while the original Rugby rules evolved in a different branch into gridiron variants of Canadian and American football. Soccer, Canadian football, American football, and modern rugby all emerged from these precursors during the 1860’s to 1870’s and therefore are more or less contemporary, with none able to claim definitive original use of the word football.
Rugby has always involved moving the ball by hand as well as backward or lateral passing of the ball. American rules introduced unique innovations including forward passing, the scrimmage line, and movement via the downs system. Rugby’s game flow was always more free-flowing and semi-chaotic as is soccer today, but the innovations of soccer include most exclusions of hands, the prohibition of tackling, and the addition of a goalkeeper in front of a ground-based goal. It’s easy to see how these two branches evolved in totally different directions from a common rugby ancestor, while modern rugby remained as its own viable branch. Similarly, humans, chimps, and gorillas are all viable modern variants of a primitive common ancestor, while creationists remain an unevolved separate branch retaining original features such as lower intelligence, belief in magic, and knuckle dragging.
So which game is properly called football today? All of them. Football is a generic term and is used to identify the dominant sport in any given region. The proper name for NFL style football is either American Football or Gridiron Football. The proper name for soccer is Association Football. It is provincial arrogance for anyone to claim their favorite sport is “real football” even if that name is used as convenient shorthand in each region.
The name “soccer” comes from the “soc” in Association Football. The schism in English football in the mid 19th century made the use of the term football confusing as both variants were played in the same geographical region. For shorthand, the players for the two variants were referred to as ruggers and soccers, for Rugby rules and Association rules respectively. Therefore the term soccer was originated in England, not in the US, which may come as a surprise to chain smoking European cheese eating surrender monkeys who tend to think of the word as evidence of American ignorance.
Each of these sports require a tremendous amount of skill and stamina, although obviously player attributes are mostly not interchangeable. Ronaldo would be knocked out of his shoes by any decent linebacker, and Zidane would be killed instantly if he tried to head butt an NFL lineman, not to mention Suarez attempting to snack on, say, Jack Lambert. Any player faking an injury in the NFL is an object of universal ridicule (think: Limas Sweed) rather than acclaim as in soccer, and incessant whining is acceptable in the NFL only if your name is Harbaugh. On the other hand, NFL players would be destroyed in trying to play a real soccer match. James Harrison nearly died of coronary infarction from his famed Super Bowl interception runback. Imagine doing that nearly non-stop for 90+ minutes in the sweltering heat of the Brazilian jungle! Soccer may be mostly boring as hell to watch, but it does take some serious skill to manipulate a ball at full speed without your hands and to keep it up with little break.
It’s true that soccer has evolved into an almost unbearable wussie sport of diving and crying, and suffers from an absurd officiating and timekeeping system. But to be fair I can’t say I’m fully ecstatic over where gridiron is evolving under the leadership of Roger Goodell and his team of cheeseless surrender monkey lawyers. Still, gridiron remains vastly superior to soccer in my completely biased view and I don’t think even Roger can do anything to change that assessment.
Postscript: For those unaware of it, we can at least very clearly pinpoint the origin of professional American football. William Heffelfinger issued a $500 contract in 1892 for a gridiron football game between the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Thus the first professional American rules football game was played between two Pittsburgh teams. Furthermore, the first professional league (known as the National Football League but unrelated to the current NFL) formed in 1902 as an offseason endeavor of several baseball clubs including the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates team, the Pittsburgh Stars, won the first league championship. (The baseball Pirates were also the National League champions in 1902, with 103 wins and a 27.5 game lead over second place Brooklyn.) Thus a pattern for the future was born.
Meanwhile, an ancestor of Ray Lewis was murdering two people in suburban Baltimore and getting off scott free.
Okay, I made up that thing about Ray Lewis. Probably.
This wasn’t the greatest era for the Steelers, but how awesome it was to have these two gentlemen grace the cover of SI squaring off once again. (H/T Steelers Depot)
This is hard for we youngsters to remember, but c. 1969 the city of Pittsburgh was down on itself, and self-identified as “The City of Losers”. This should, perhaps, give us pause before we heap abuse on our brethren in Cleveland, a town that surely is the current owner of that moniker. The July 28, 1969 issue of the Pittsburgh Press welcomed Chuck Noll, hired the previous evening fresh off of his Super Bowl loss as defensive coordinator for the Baltimore (yuck) Colts against Western PA native Joe Namath and the upstart Jets.
Check out the caption on the accompanying photo and enjoy the article.
You may have noticed that I love looking back at old newspapers and swimming in the contemporary zeitgeist. One of the joys of this activity is 20-20 hindsight on Steelers history.
I searched for the January 29, 1969 issue of the Pittsburgh Press because this was the day after Chuck Noll was selected by Dan Rooney to be the head coach of the Steelers, and we all know how that turned out. But interestingly, this newspaper issue also turned out to be the one immediately following the NFL draft. Hard to believe, but in those days the draft was held in January just after the Super Bowl. At the current pace, in a few years the draft may be held a week before the start of the season… but I digress.
The paper reported on fan reaction to the drafting of Joe Greene in the first round. I found some of the comments to be oddly familiar.
One guy was incensed that the Steelers bypassed a chance to select Terry Hanratty and instead opted for a no-name defensive lineman. A bus driver commented, “I never heard of him… They had a chance at Hanratty? They didn’t take him?” The Steelers did take Hanratty in the second round, and we know how that worked out too. Nothing against Terry, but choosing him in the first round would have been popular with the fans but a disaster for the Steelers, particularly after another Terry was chosen with the first pick a year later.
Another commented, “Actually, the way the Steelers are going, I’m not surprised at the pick. I would have liked to see them line up a secondary.” No word on if this guy’s name is MWalsh. 🙂
A salesman, perhaps named Malsor, added, “Am I surprised? You better believe it. The sports fans here are so sick at heart that I can’t see this move. Oh well, they didn’t get Paterno either.”
An unnamed stockbroker turned out to be perhaps the wisest of this bunch. “Joe Greene must have been rated pretty good. The scouts from the Steelers haven’t been too good, but I got to go with him. They know more than I do.”
