Ironhead, What's With This Thingy

Earlier this year, I wrote about how future NFL Hall of Famer and fellow Woodland Hills High School graduate Rob Gronkowski returned to our high school for the reopening of the school's weight room. Gronk's foundation contributed a significant amount of money to make this happen. 

Earlier this week, another Pittsburgh sports legend visited Woodland Hills for a different endeavor. Cameron ("Cam") Heyward was the Steelers' first round draft pick in 2011. He is the son of the late Craig "Ironhead" Heyward, who was a legend at the University of Pittsburgh, had a successful NFL career, and is the star of one of my favorite commercials of all time.

Cam has been the anchor of the Steelers defense over the last decade plus, made the Pro Bowl multiple times, and won the 2023 NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year award for his philanthropic contributions and community impact. One of his initiatives is Craig's Closet, which provides free dress clothes to high school boys throughout Western Pennsylvania. Cam, his mother, and members of The Heyward House visited WHHS on Tuesday for the opening of a Craig's Closet at the high school. This is a very cool project, and I'm glad that Heyward is helping the Woodland Hills community. It also might be the only time where Heyward, a fellow graduate of The Ohio State University, can proudly say Go Wolverines!

More information about Craig's Closet is available here. You can also learn more about Cam's visit to Woodland Hills with additional pictures here and here.

Keanu Reeves, Steelers Fan

Keanu Reeves recently appeared on the Kelce Brothers podcast, New Heights. Per the video here, the big revelation from the podcast (at least in my world) is that Reeves grew up as a Steelers fan.

While I’m not going to dispute Reeves’ childhood and fandom, I find it odd that this seems to be the first record of Reeves being a Steelers fan. That was going to be the premise of my post. In all his years as an actor, I figured Reeves spent time filming in Pittsburgh and at some point he would have mentioned in a local news interview that he liked the Steelers as a child. Turns out, it seems that Reeves hasn’t spent much time in Pittsburgh. It was a big deal when he got coffee in Pittsburgh in 2023 prior to playing a gig with his band Dogstar.* He also filmed the movie The Prince of Pennsylvania in 1988, but I can’t find any blog posts or reels of Reeves from when he filmed that.

So instead of being confused as to why we never learned of Reeves being a Steelers fan until now, we need to encourage Keanu to make a movie in Pittsburgh!

* About 25 years ago, I worked as a beer vendor at several Columbus Clippers minor league baseball games. (I was one of the guys walking around the stands yelling "beer here.") Dogstar played a concert after one of the games. I stayed for the first song, and they sounded pretty good, but I was tired and left the stadium.

10 Years of LearnedLeague

I was invited to join LearnedLeague in 2015, and it's become a significant part of my life. Before I get too far, LearnedLeague is the trivia league of all trivia leagues and features countless Jeopardy! contestants and champions. There are six divisions or rundles: A, B, C, D, E, and R for rookies. It's invitation-only, and you're obviously in R for the first season. R is the most difficult season. You face players of all skill levels, and without knowing their question history, you're somewhat guessing how to play defense. Plus, you're still trying to understand how all of this works.

My rookie season was LL66. Due to my terrible performance that year, I was naturally placed in an E rundle where I have pretty much stayed for the next 40 seasons. Every once in a while, I earned promotion to D only to get relegated back to E the following season. I've actually been very successful (for me) recently as I got promoted to D for LL season 104 and stayed up for 105, 106, and now the upcoming 107 season. Yes, we're now up to season #107. 

I know that I'm not explaining LearnedLeague very well and skipping a lot. You can get basic information as a non-member on the LearnedLeague website. There's also an LL Wikipedia page and articles about LL by places like The Ringer, The New Yorker, and Milwaukee Magazine.

In my now 41 seasons of playing, I've learned a lot about my knowledge base. My best categories are pop music, television, games/sports, current events, and American history in that order. Meanwhile, my five worst categories are language, art, science, classical music, and math. I've only got 5 of 133 math questions correct, which is like 0.004%. (Math joke. It's actually significantly better at.038%!) I really should try to find a way to improve these scores. Anyway, it's really easy to play defense against me. If there's a question about one of my best categories, assign me the lowest possible points. Conversely, assign me lots of points for the latter categories since there's an excellent chance I'm going to get it wrong.

The primary mantra of LearnedLeague is don't forfeit, don't cheat. I'm proud that I have never forfeited in 1025 matches. What's funny is that I should have forfeited my 5th ever match. I drove to Pittsburgh that day and stayed at a hotel with my two young kids at the time. I was busy and exhausted and didn't answer the questions. However, the LL website ended up being down for part of that day, so they extended the deadline by a day. Over the next ten years, there have been plenty of times when I fell asleep on the couch, woke up right around the 1:00 AM Eastern time deadline and got credit for completing the answers.

One of my favorite parts of LL is the offseason mini leagues. While there are plenty of mini leagues that aren't for me, there are others particularly focused on sports and music which are perfect. In mini leagues, you are placed in completely random groups. It's fun defeating A-rundle players who would crush me in general knowledge but not in genre-specific games. I actually had a close loss in a mini-league several years ago against Jeopardy! champion Brad Rutter!

LearnedLeague is not for everyone, but I do have referrals available if you want to check it out. Just let me know The first season is free, and then there's an annual fee. It's fun and you might learn something. Not trying to sell anyone on this. Just sharing my experience.

2025 Washington Nationals Recap

Back in March, I asked an esteemed group of individuals for their predictions for the 2025 Nationals season. Want to see how everyone did? Or would rather bury the original post and hope that it never sees the light of day again? Well, since I already created a blog post title, feel free to see how we did. Or don't.

1. There are high expectations for 2023 #2 overall pick Dylan Crews. What do you expect from him this season?

Crews, the #2 overall pick after some guy named Paul Skenes in Pittsburgh, only played in 85 games thanks to injuries. His overall stats of 10 home runs and 17 stolen bases seem encouraging. 27 RBIs, a .208 batting average, and .280 on-base percentage are not so encouraging. Crews was one of the best college hitters of the last 20 years, so it seems unlikely that he forgot to hit overnight. Still, it's been a difficult adjustment to the major leagues. Most of the group had high expectations for Crews, and he didn't live up to them. Frank probably was the closest in his predictions of putting "some pressure on the defense with his base stealing ability." 

2. Who will lead the Nationals in home runs in 2025?

This ended up being an easy one. Nearly everyone (Ryan, Frank, Richard, Chris, Marc, and Sean) picked James Wood who led the Nats with 31 home runs.

3. Will the Nationals be buyers or sellers at the trade deadline?

Pretty much everyone through the team would be sellers and they were though not really any big names.  Kyle Finnegan went to Detroit, Amed Rosario to the Yankees, Michael Soroka to the Cubs, Alex Call to the Dodgers, and Andrew Chafin and Luis Garcia to the Angels. You have to be very good at Immaculate Grid or really, really, really follow the Nationals to know most of these players. (Maybe Josh Bell was frustrated not getting traded?)

4. Will CJ Abrams go to a casino this season?

Probably a mean question. I'll just pretend that I didn't ask this.

5. Who will be the team's surprise/breakout player this year?

Richard wrote that this player isn't on the opening day lineup and he was right. Daylen Lile joined the Nats in late May and excelled after the All-Star break. Lile hit .304 in August with 1 home run and 8 RBIs to go along with a .353 on-base percentage. In September, Lile hit .391(!!!) with 6 home runs, 19 RBIs, a .440 on-base percentage and .772 slugging percentage. That's a 1.212 OPS! (OPS is On-Base plus Slugging.) While I understand that this stat is for only one month, as a comparison, Aaron Judge led the majors with a 1.144 OPS and Ohtani was next with a 1.014. 

Partial credit to Ryan for predicting Jose Ferrer. Ferrer pitched pretty well in the closer role after the team traded Finnegan.

6. Which Nats Summer Concert are you looking forward to the most?

OAR and Nelly were the right answers, but there really weren't any wrong answers.

7. Finally, what's your overall prediction for the Nationals? (ex. record, finish in the NL East).

Well, the team was pretty lousy this year finishing 66-96 and last place in the NL East. The record was only better than the Chicago White Sox and dreadful Colorado Rockies. The team fired the manager and general manager mid-season. While I'm not sure anyone would call this rock bottom, I think it's an understatement to say that the Nationals 2025 season was a disappointment. No one thought the Nationals would be THIS bad, though Frank was the closest predicting 70 wins.

Josh Bell photo by Benny Sieu - Imagn Images

Lawrence Moten (1972-2025)

If you asked me to come up with a list of 1,000 blog post suggestions, a post about Lawrence Moten would not be in the top 5,000. However, the passing of the Syracuse legend earlier this week brought up several memories. I grew up a fan of the University of Pittsburgh basketball team and by extension the Big East conference. I also went to college in upstate/central New York where Syracuse basketball was the biggest sports team in the area.*

Moten played for Syracuse from 1991-92 through 1994-95. Looking at his stats, he was only a 31.6% career 3-point shooter (though the 3-point shot wasn't as important or used as much then) and a 71.6% free throw shooter. Yet, Moten averaged 19.3 points per game in his four seasons. He was annoying. He always seemed to make a big shot or a key free throw near the end of games. Moten wasn't on the team that went to the NCAA championship in 1995 (which featured John Wallace and Otis Hill), but he was a big part of the foundation for that team.

Moten also played at a time when you really got to know college basketball players. Look, I'm all for current players getting as much NIL money as possible. Colleges profited off of players for years. I also think it was completely unfair that coaches could leave schools whenever they wanted for a new job but players would have to sit out a year if they transferred between institutions. I'm all for players being able to move from school to school. We'll get back to that momentarily. 

Pitt is still my favorite basketball team. I just looked at the 2025-2026 roster and really only recognize two names, Cam Corhen and Brandin Cummings. Okay, Papa Amadou Kante also looks familiar since he had a good game against Ohio State at the beginning of the last season. Otherwise, everyone else is new except for Amdy Ndiaye who played all of 21 minutes over 8 games during the 2024-2025 season. The complete turnover of rosters from year to year isn't exclusive to Pitt. It's everywhere. I also follow George Mason basketball closely, and there is only one player (Brayden O'Connor) who had significant playing time last season on the roster this year. 

Which brings me back to Moten. During his time, you knew the best players in college basketball. Looking at the all Big East teams from the early to mid-1990s, I remember nearly all of the names. I can't do that for many teams/conferences today. Maybe it's because I followed college basketball more closely in my teenage years than now, but I don't think that's the case. Yes, while the best NCAA players go professional immediately, many of the really good players switch teams year to year. It's impossible to follow. 

Moten was a star at Syracuse and in the community. That rarely happens in college basketball today when players are only at a school for a year or two.

RIP.

* Completely unrelated to Moten, in 1995 or 1996 former Vice President Dan Quayle spoke at Ithaca College. He may or may not have been testing the waters for a Presidential bid. Anyway, Quayle, born in Indiana and a representative of the Hoosier state in the House and Senate, started the speech by mentioning how Indiana defeated Syracuse in the 1987 NCAA title game thanks to a Keith Smart game-winning shot. The crowd, which was not all college students, was not pleased. There wasn't booing, but there was definitely an uneasiness of him bringing up a sore subject. For my Pittsburgh friends, it would be the equivalent of a Georgia politician speaking in Western Pennsylvania and being excited to mention Francisco Cabrera.

Photos by Manny Milan - Sports Illustrated via Getty and Nick Lisi AP