Steelers Training Camp for Fans, Part Two: The Traps

A monumental man-cave

by Ivan Cole

[ n.b. We assume without question that preseason training for players is absolutely essential to any hope for team success. Why not apply the same logic to fans? Parts One and Two of the series gives one person’s take on how fans can understand and enhance their appreciation of the game. Part Three will explain why there is never likely to be a perfect draft, and Part Four speaks to the dangers of ahistorical fandom.]

Allies

The cruel irony of our situation is that in the midst of an incredible abundance of informational possibilities our ability to benefit has become increasingly more limited. Whether you would place the blame on the failures of an educational system producing citizens that lack perspective and understanding of their social environment, the lack of ability to think in a critical fashion, or a television based culture that creates short attention spans and celebrates the superficial and the trivial (including an outsized emphasis on the importance of sports over other concerns), increasingly for many of us it is as though we sit at a full banquet table, starving because we lack hands and a mouth.

I always believed that three elements were necessary to make a good argument or to be a competent debater. You first had to possess a mastery of at least minimum amount of information and facts. Next, you need experience, first hand or not, with the subject matter. Call it wisdom if you like. And then, for lack of a better term, there is attitude; a flair, a measure of confidence or theatrics, such as humor for example, which has been marshaled in the service of making the case for your point of view. The problem for some is, their handle on the facts is limited at best. Worse still, and pretty amazing in a nauseating way, some don’t actually know the difference between a fact and an opinion. Ahistorical and with painfully short attention spans, experience is unavailable or ignored. What’s left?

Attitude

There is a word for attitude that exists in a vacuum separate from facts and experience. That would be bullshit. The greater reliance on attitude also explains, at least in part, the disrespectful and negative tone of much of our sports conversation. Lacking the proper grounding to effectively attack the other person’s arguments, what’s left? You attack the person with the thought that discrediting the individual invalidates the argument. If you are a ‘negative nelly’, ‘homer,’ ‘pollyanna’, ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’ then your thoughts and opinions can be simply dismissed.

Now if we were just speaking about some lower strata of the social order that would be one thing. But have you really been paying attention to what friends of mine contemptuously label as suburban sports talk radio? This is where fans go to learn be dumb. All attitude all the time. A mecca for the marginal.

Social media can be a culprit as well. Half-baked notions that would never resonate beyond the confines of the local tavern or barbershop now have a platform that is potentially global in reach, and anonymity provides inviting cover for ill-considered remarks, slander, trolling and bullying.

The mantle of being ‘knowledgeable’.

A quick and somewhat irreverent look at Guard David DeCastro

via Steelers.com

by Rebecca Rollett

When David DeCastro fell to the Steelers in the 2012 draft at Pick #24 in the first round, the reaction around Steeler Nation was everything from pleased to seriously ecstatic.

This was probably best expressed by the commentor who said “We got a pony for Christmas!!!!!” I think there may have been some other words in there, too, but that was the gist of it.

While guards do not typically get drafted in the first round, at least by the Steelers, the general feeling was that this was a special case, potentially a once-in-a-generation player. Charged at Stanford with protecting Andrew Luck, with whom he is still close, DeCastro was someone for whom many Steeler fans had pined during the run-up to the draft, but never thought they would see in a Steelers uniform.

Steelers Training Camp for Fans, Part One: The Myth of the ‘Knowledgeable’ Fan

by Ivan Cole

n.b. We assume without question that preseason training for players is absolutely essential to any hope for team success. Why not apply the same logic to fans?

Parts One and Two of the series gives one person’s take on how fans can understand and enhance their appreciation of the game. Part Three will explain why there is never likely to be a perfect draft, and Part Four speaks to the dangers of ahistorical fandom. (Click the links to read the other articles.)

I have a friend of many years who for the purpose of this article I will call ‘Joe’. Joe, as he does every year, will call me at some point over the Labor Day weekend to discuss our views on the upcoming season. For his part, Joe will basically parrot the information he receives from ESPN, NFL Network, sports talk radio and other aspects of sports media. A New Yorker, with allegiances that to the sensibilities of Steelers fans would be viewed as mushy at best, he will launch into an analysis of which team will be favored to win the Super Bowl and the prospects for his own team, the Raiders (or is it the Chargers? The Jets? Check with me in September). He will authoritatively give his take on these things, but this is a deception. I don’t use the term “parrot” lightly. He’s not thinking much of anything, save for following the template given to him by the ‘experts’. But he, like so many fans, will claim that thoughts planted into his mind by another, just like the Jedi Mind Trick, are his own. He doesn’t say ‘So and so said this and I am in agreement’. His Svengali is edited out of his statement for reasons we will get to eventually.

This becomes glaringly obvious when the conversation swings around to the Steelers. He will tell me what he’s heard and I will then confirm some of it and deny/correct/interpret most of the rest. He will react with some skepticism and occasional disbelief After all, this is not what the experts are saying. I sound like some nutcase homer. But over the years I have been proven right (or, more accurately, more right than the experts) often enough that he will reserve judgment.

Speed Kills… But How Much Can it Help the Steelers?

by Rebecca Rollett

Image by Lori King, Toledo Blade

I started doing some research for an article on running back Dri Archer last season. In the course of my research I ran across a couple of players who also caught my eye. Said article was never completed, and so I’m revisiting it to see what happened to the guys I was writing about.

In the past several years there seemed to be a sort of thread tying the Steelers’ draft choices together. The 2013 draft was, to my eyes at least, all about character, an apparent reaction to some of the risks the Steelers had taken in the 2012 draft which didn’t entirely pan out.

The 2014 draft, in what seemed a departure for the Black and Gold, was on the surface at least almost entirely about speed. Even the aptly-monikered “Shade Tree,” Daniel McCullers, is pretty fast for such a large man.

Perhaps, several years after Warren Sapp declared the Steelers “old, slow, and done,” the front office finally decided to build a team no one could possibly call old or slow, at any rate.