Go Steelers!

by Charlie Wilmoth on Jan 18, 2009 11:34 PM EST

To the Super Bowl!

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woooooooo hooooooooooo

That is all

by lost_zero on Jan 18, 2009 11:39 PM EST reply actions

Yawn.

Five weeks till pitchers and catchers?

Don’t get me wrong, I like football. Football is a fine game.

I don’t like football players. I don’t like football coaches. I don’t like football broadcasters. I don’t like football writers (Dan Jenkins excepted). And I especially don’t like football fans (family members excluded). I don’t like the NFL’s pompous self-regard. I don’t like college football’s refusal to institute a playoff system.

But I like football just fine.

by bucdaddy on Jan 19, 2009 1:00 AM EST reply actions

You dont like football fans?

Id love to hear a little elaboration on that one

by Jett on Jan 19, 2009 1:30 AM EST up reply actions

OK, here goes

Football seems to me a way for large numbers of people to channel and release their aggression in a semi-non-psychopathic way. The games are essentially modern gladiator combat, with a (psychologically, at least) similar blood lust among the audience. You can pretty much smell the testosterone in the air. Too often seems to me that if there were no football, more than a few of these people would be in street gangs, or sitting in jail from Saturday night bar fights. On top of which (from what I read, cause I don’t go to football games anymore) a lot of these people are just drunken louts whose real goal is to stand in a parking lot for hours before a game and see how stupid they can get. That’s just not an atmosphere I care to submit myself to.

(In his “First 99 Reasons Baseball is Better Than Football” Thomas Boswell wrote: “Tailgating. No self-respecting baseball fan would hold a party in a parking lot.”)

I will be the first to admit that a few baseball fans can be idiots too. At least these people don’t seem to earn the fellow-fan respect that idiots at football games do.

by bucdaddy on Jan 19, 2009 9:54 AM EST up reply actions

Now, me...

…I just dislike Steelers fans. Their sense of entitlement every season is a lot like that belonging to Yankees fans, Red Sox fans, Montreal Canadiens fans (yeah, yeah, I know, nobody cares about hockey, but nobody does smarmy self-importance like Canadiens fans do), and, uh, cough DallasCowboysfanlikeme.

by matskralc on Jan 19, 2009 1:42 PM EST up reply actions

I must say that I like baseball blogs more than football blogs.

There is far more in depth analysis on this blog and onlybucs.net than any football blog I’ve ever seen. That being said, BTSC is the best football blog I’ve seen. Also HERE WE GO STEELERS HERE WE GO!!!!!!!!!

by houksyndrome on Jan 19, 2009 2:14 PM EST up reply actions

I think there's a good reason for that

Even most football coaches say they don’t know what really happened in a game until they look at the video. And these are people who immerse themselves in the game 18 hours a day, 365 days a year. And they watch a game and they don’t really know what they saw.

In baseball there’s one guy throwing the ball to one guy, and if that one guy hits the ball in play most of the time there are at most two or three other guys running around. So it’s pretty easy to follow and to see what’s going on. The outfielder bobbles the ball or misses the cutoff man or the shortstop throws a grounder into the seats, everybody knows who screwed up.

Football, there are 22 guys running around on every play. You focus on the quarterback, but — just to take something simple — if he throws an interception, you don’t really know what happened. Did the receiver run a wrong route? Did the QB overthrow or underthrow his intended receiver? Was he under too much pressure because a lineman missed his block? Potentially there are 11 guys who screwed up, and you can’t really know which one did unless the error is blatant, or somebody confesses.

So the head coach admits he can’t see it all and understand what happened. What chance does the guy in the seats have, really?

This, I think, is why there is so little really good writing about football in general, not just by bloggers. Because 99.5% of the guys in the press box aren’t a whole lot smarter than the guys in the stands. They don’t really know what they’re seeing either. They’re pretty much at the mercy of what the coaches and players tell them after the game, and that makes for some pretty dull analysis (really, when’s the last time you read a good analysis of what happened in a football game? Something deeper than “The offensive line broke down,” or something like that).

So whereas baseball writers and bloggers can fill the hours between games breaking down every pitch, football writers, who have days to break down a game, pretty much give up and fill those days with fluff and features and injury reports and “meet next week’s opponent” and moronic stuff like weekly polls and power ratings. Because they know it’s the only way for fans to feel engaged, since they haven’t a snowball’s chance of understanding the game they all just watched.

by bucdaddy on Jan 19, 2009 8:02 PM EST up reply actions

You make an excellent point

Football is indeed very complex. However, news coverage could do a much better job of illustrating the Xs and Os than they actually do. Merrill Hoge and Ron Jaworski used to do a show where they broke down plays the entire time. It was outstanding. Unfortunately, the networks instead just focus on hyping everything up instead of actual analysis.

by houksyndrome on Jan 20, 2009 1:49 AM EST up reply actions

Thanks, houk

“60 Minutes” did a piece a couple weeks ago about the Texas Tech coach. In the course of the piece they had the Tech QB throw a pass out of one of those five-receiver formations, which took him at most three seconds (they did this with a camera attached to his helmet, so you could see what he saw). Then they asked the QB to watch the tape and break down what he saw and what his options were and why he threw where he did. They didn’t show the whole thing, but said it took him three minutes (think he was speaking in football jargon the whole time). So another reason, probably, they don’t do much analysis is it would bore the legs off maybe 98% of the fans, everybody but the hardcore maniacs.

Of course, as if it needs to be said, I suppose you don’t really need to know all that stuff to enjoy a football game, just like you don’t need to know Jack Wilson’s OPS+ or Zone Rating to enjoy a baseball game. But I certainly think the experience is enhanced the more you do understand. And it’s almost certainly much easier to understand what happens on the baseball field than the football field. I suspect there’s a reason football fans gotta tailgate and get loaded before the game (besides fortifying themselves to sit in freezing cold for four hours); if they thought about it too much, the brain would go numb from boredom if all you did was show up, watch the game and leave.

And let’s not forget the betting, which is another thing so wildly popular because it makes watching football tolerably interesting.

by bucdaddy on Jan 20, 2009 10:37 AM EST up reply actions

I agree that football analysis is very hard. You can look at stats which have very little meaning. You can break down tape to figure how a play went, but that’s still only one play, and you’re talking about hours of tape to get a good idea about one player. The best statistical analysis of football (Football Outsiders) struggles to tell how good teams and skill position players are, let alone offensive and defensive linemen. It’s a joke compared to baseball.

Sports are all a combination of skill and randomness, though, so football just has a higher uncertainty factor than baseball. You should listen to the F.O. guys complain that the Cardinals (who were like 17th or something in their rankings) made the Super Bowl. That’d be like the Rockies beating the Red Sox a few years ago. In football, anyone really can win because there’s a high enough degree of uncertainty.

However, there’s also a huge demand for football and a limited number of games, so networks hire guys who don’t break down film or know much about individual teams, and don’t have the benefit of useful statistical breakdowns like “there’s a higher chance of a multi-run inning after a lead-off HR than a lead-off walk”. If you get past the mainstream analysts, though, it’s really a lot of fun to delve deeper into a team. I’ve watched the Steelers very closely this year, and I can tell you what kinds of defenses they struggle against, what formations they can and can’t run out of, some of the reasons their defense is so good, what types of offenses can’t exploit holes in our defenses, etc. However, I’ve spent way too much time doing all that all year, and I’m mostly only looking at one team. I wouldn’t be able to give intelligent analysis on more than a handful of teams, even if it was a full time job.

charity standing orders

by BadMaafala on Jan 20, 2009 10:57 AM EST up reply actions

Way to go

Steelers!

by patthatt on Jan 19, 2009 7:01 AM EST reply actions

Oh yes!

An ENGLISH guy who watched an AMERICAN team while on holiday in AUSTRALIA is over the MOON!

Back to Blighty for the Superbowl, but you can’t have everything, eh?

by RDV across the sea on Jan 19, 2009 7:17 AM EST reply actions

Uggh. Football.

I love the Buccos. Like the Pens. Can’t stand the Steelers & their mostly bandwagon fans. If the Steelers went through a 15-16 year playoff drought, would they have the large fanbase or ‘Steeler Nation’ we see today? I doubt it.

by phil79 on Jan 19, 2009 2:08 PM EST reply actions

They went on a pretty significant drought between 1980 and the mid 90s

I know they made the playoffs a few times during that stretch but they didn’t really have any great teams during that time. I am 26 and the Steelers hadn’t won a superbowl during my life until 2006 – in fact they had been a pretty heartbreaking team to root for, with all the AFC championship game losses. I don’t think our fans are bandwagon at all.

by houksyndrome on Jan 19, 2009 2:18 PM EST up reply actions

There were Steeler fans before the '70s.

And those teams were, generally, pretty crappy.

If they lost a whole lot, people would get frustrated, but they’d still care.

by Vlad on Jan 19, 2009 2:47 PM EST up reply actions

Mehhh. Football and I have a weird relationship. I am a Steelers fan only insomuch as I am a Pittsburgh-in-general fan. Which means I don’t really know or care about anything re: the game itself, but, well, I spent a lot of time today yell-singing “PITTSBURGH’S GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL” at hater co-workers.

by EmmaOMG on Jan 19, 2009 4:04 PM EST reply actions

Yeah, I’m not a football fan either. I only ever watch games with my brothers and my dad. I’m always thrilled to see the Steelers succeed, though.

by Charlie Wilmoth on Jan 19, 2009 8:27 PM EST up reply actions

Football

Football is a great game to watch, but the culture around it is abysmal — a shrill mixture of corporate hype, military jingoism, and self celebratory stupid macho posturing. The “mute” button is VERY important when watching a football game. That said, I love the Steelers almost — almost — as much as I love the Pirates, and BTSC really does have some thoughtful and well written analysis.

And I mean, c’mon, how can you not love Troy Polamau and Hines Ward?

by brooklynpirate on Jan 19, 2009 9:41 PM EST reply actions