Pittsburgh South

Many Pittsburgh sports fans are rooting for the Kansas City Chiefs to win the upcoming Super Bowl. Sure, part of this is because KC quarterback Patrick Mahomes is likable, so fun to watch, and appears in commercials with Steelers legend Troy Polamalu. 

However, the bigger reason some Steelers fans will support KC is because the Tampa Bay Buccaneers employ the most decorated QB in NFL history (and frequent Steelers tormentor) Tom Brady and former Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown. Although Brown was arguably the best WR in the NFL over the last decade, let's just write that he did not depart from Pittsburgh and Steelers on the best of terms.

Have you looked at the Tampa Bay organization though? And yes, I'm talking to Pittsburgh sports fans here. If you did, you'll see a lot of familiar names. Let's start with the obvious. Head coach Bruce Arians served as the Steelers wide receivers coach from 2004-2006 and offensive coordinator ("OC") from 2007-2011. The Steelers reached the Super Bowl twice when Arians was the OC, winning the title in the 2008 season. Then, after the 2011 season, he "retired." I still don't think the retirement was fully explained as he joined the Indianapolis Colts the next season.

Looking at the roster, there are several players with Pittsburgh or Western Pennsylvania ties. The biggest name is obviously fellow Woodland Hills High School graduate Rob Gronkowski. Gronk and I have a lot in common besides graduating from the same high school. Gronk is going to be in the NFL Hall of Fame. I've visited the NFL Hall of Fame. Gronk appeared on The Masked Singer and CBS' Game On! I've watched both of those shows. I mean, there's a lot more, but I'm getting off topic.

Starting safety Jordan Whitehead is from Monaca and had a successful career at the University of Pittsburgh. While LeSean McCoy is now a back-up and hasn't played much this year, Pitt fans will also remember him well as part of an excellent crop of running backs in Panthers history. Deep on the depth chart is WR Justin Watson who went to South Fayette High School. And reserve cornerback Russ Cockrell played two years for the Steelers. Oh, and while not Pittsburgh, WR Chris Godwin, tackle Donovan Smith, and center A.Q. Shipley (though on injured reserve) went to Penn State. This matters to a lot of people in Western PA.

You're not convinced yet. I get it. Well, let's look at the coaching staff.

- Offensive Coordinator Byron Leftwich played 4 seasons as the Steelers back-up QB. I've always had a soft spot for Leftwich. When I attended the Steelers-Washington Football Team game in 2008, Leftwich led the Steelers to victory after Roethlisberger got injured. I also love the video of his Marshall offensive linemen carrying him down the field when he basically played on one leg. You want to play for or with Byron Leftwich!

- Assistant Head Coach / Running Back Coordinator Harold Goodwin worked with Arians as an offense assistant with the Steelers from 2007-2011.

- Offensive Assistant Antwaan Randle El was the most exciting offensive player on the Steelers over the last 20 years. You never knew what could happen when he had the ball.

- Defensive/Special Teams Assistant Cody Grimm. This one is a bit of a stretch since I'm not sure how much time Grimm spent in Pittsburgh. However, his dad Russ was the Steelers offensive line coach for five seasons and was part of some elite Pitt teams in the late 70s and 1980.

- Outside Linebackers coach Larry Foote played 11 seasons with the Steelers. He was so solid, dependable, and a team leader. He was also part of one of my favorite post-Super Bowl pictures.

- (I missed this one before.) Safeties coach Nick Rapone is from New Castle, was a grad assistant at Pitt in 1979-80, coached at Pitt in 1989-1992, and worked at New Castle High School in 1993-1994.

- The final Pittsburgh connection is a bit surprising. Tampa's Speed & Conditioning Coach is two-time Olympic gold medalist Roger Kingdom. How would you like to be coached by arguably the greatest 110m hurdler of all time? Oh, he's also a Pitt graduate.

Look, I understand that the dislike of Brady and Brown is strong. However, if the Bucs win, I think you can be happy for all of these other people with Pittsburgh connections.

Stick To Sports

I feel bad for my friends who are sports bloggers. It goes without saying that I feel bad for a lot of people right now, but this is a sports related post. Sort of. While there have been times over the years when I considered making Sean’s Ramblings exclusively a Pittsburgh sports blog, I always found this limiting. I like writing about my kids or entertainment or just what’s going on in my life. So while I still write about sports, I have never been a traditional sports blogger. So while I can write about various topics, it’s going to be tough for sports bloggers to come up with content over the next few weeks, months, etc. (Unless you have a blog about football and you can spend months writing about Tom Brady.)

Since we're in a country without sporting events taking place, I thought I would share a few things. First, the XFL announced last week that the league won't be playing its regular season games. I assume that means that there won't be a postseason either. You know what this means? I'm the XFL fantasy football league champion!

ESPN has a game called Streak for Cash. It's a monthly contest where you pick various props such as who will win NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB, soccer, and college games. There might also be individual props such as points scored or goals per game. Anyway, whoever gets the most picks correct in a row per month wins $25,000. I've played for years and never come close to winning. Anyway, with no major sports going on, the props have been quite interesting. There's a Singaporean Premier soccer league match. The Russian Super basketball league game. The other night featured whether the first Mega Millions lottery ball would be odd or even. There's even been "The Masked Singer" and "Survivor" props. I'm all for seeing what props appear next!

And now is where this blog post turns dramatically. Want to know one positive thing about the NCAA cancelling the men's and women's basketball tournaments? Liberty University's men's team, who earned an automatic birth, will not get to play. I'm sure that most of the students, faculty, and staff at Liberty University are good people. The problem is the school's president, Jerry Falwell Jr. I wrote about Falwell being a sore loser after the Virginia elections in 2017. Less than two months ago, Falwell tried to get some Virginia counties to secede and join West Virginia (and he's still working on this). This is completely absurd, but I guess it's politics by someone who is supposed to be spiritual leader and educator. He's all for free speech...except when it comes to people at his own school. Oh, Liberty University also owns Freedom Aviation who sells jet fuel to the Pentagon. I'm not sure how that fits into the school's mission.

Now, Falwell is being dangerous. Last Friday, he went on "Fox & Friends" and said, "You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work and so maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump,” he said. This meaning the coronavirus.



You can even hear the anger about the school having to cancel residential classes.

University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., said, “We originally believed it was safest to return our students following their spring break instead of having them return following greater exposure opportunities from leaving them in different parts of the country for longer periods. But, the Governor’s recent decision to limit certain gatherings has left us no practical choice because we have so many classes of more than 100 students. We want to provide for the continuity of our students’ education while doing what makes sense to help slow the spread of the coronavirus to our university family and local community.” The school has one of the largest online student populations in the world, so they can of all places can handle social distancing better than most.

The whole point is that Liberty University, meaning specifically Falwell Jr., doesn't need any type of positive exposure from the basketball team. He's the worst.

I'm going to end this post with something good. Here's Will Ferrell being a soccer referee a few weeks ago.

This isn't a movie. Apparently, all of the parents in this league need to volunteer, and he's a parent. The uniform is legit, so it's possible that he really is a certified soccer ref. Just another thing that me and Will have in common!

Major Announcement: Sean 2020

I'm concerned about the present state and future of our country. Too much division and not enough working together to find some common ground. I think I can help bring the country together. Therefore, I am proud to announce that I am forming an exploratory committee for the a 2020 Presidential bid. You’re probably thinking, Sean, why would I vote for you to be President of the United States? My response is that I created a comprehensive platform back in 2012, and I still stand by this today. (Well, except for the NHL lockout part since there currently isn’t a lockout, but as President, I pledge that I will ensure that there is no lockout or strike when the current agreement between the players and owners ends.)

You’re probably also thinking, we’re a divided country, so how are you going to bring us together? I have several ideas. The first is to force Tom Brady to retire from the New England Patriots after this Sunday’s Super Bowl. I realize that I may lose significant votes in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine, but I feel like I can win them back with this argument. The rest of the country is tired of seeing the Patriots appear in the Super Bowl, so forcing Brady to leave that team is an automatic win. For Patriots fans, don’t you want to see how the team plays without Brady but with Bill Belichick still as coach? This has been a hypothetical discussion for years. Now we can see it happen. Plus, can Brady win as QB for another team without Belichick? The country can really get behind this.

We can also bond on criticizing the Academy Awards for making the absurd decision not to nominate Won't You Be My Neighbor for Best Documentary. Instead, the Academy gave a nomination to Free Solo, even though we saw that movie 30 years ago when it was called Return of the Jedi.

I'm still not sure what we can do about this injustice. Maybe sanctions? Maybe it's just teaching the country about the legacy and importance of Mister Rogers.

You probably wonder why I'm announcing my candidacy now. It's still many months before the primaries and the Iowa caucus begin. (Something else we can agree on...caucus is a funny word!) Well, one year ago last week, I had surgery on my dislocated wrist. Many people thought I would never become a PGA golfer, compete in a tennis Grand Slam event, or pitch in a MLB game. Well, I proved everyone wrong. I mean, I haven't done any of these things (yet), but my wrist is as healthy as it's going to be, so I'm just waiting for the call.

This is the difficult part. I need volunteers to serve on my exploratory committee. Your important job will be to poll the country and see if I have a chance to compete. I also don’t have Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz money, so if you could contribute a few million dollars, that would be great.

I’m thinking that being on this committee will not be a very time-consuming endeavor!


The Brady-Belichick picture is from USA Today.

Hating The Patriots

On Saturday night, Alan Saunders of Pittsburgh Sports Now, Pirates Prospects, and the Beaver County Times among other places mentioned on Twitter that he has an NFL column bouncing around in his head, but he doesn't write about the NFL or have his own column. I replied that he was welcome to share his thoughts here. Amazingly, he said yes. So here's Alan:

We don’t root for injuries in football. 

It’s an interesting thing, that piece of football fandom, and it tells us a lot about the way we tick as football fans. Of the major American team sports, football is by far the most violent. Men of over 300 pounds collide with one another at the force of a minor automobile accident dozens of times a game. 

Injuries are a part of football. The league has a policy that each team must release a list of which players are injured and how injured they are each and every week. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule. Players are going to get hurt. It’s often said that it’s not the best team that wins the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the season, but the healthiest one.

But we don’t root for injuries, even against a foe as despised as Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, whose level of revulsion by the fans of the league’s other 31 teams is only rivaled by their own level of success. The Patriots, who now await the winner of the Pittsburgh - Kansas City game, escaped their Divisional Round game against Houston without any serious injuries, whether they were rooted for or not.

The fact that we don’t root for injuries is a lesson I learned in 1989. That was the year I first became a sports fan, and at the impressionable age of six, there are some things that have stuck with me. The Steelers had played the Cleveland Browns early that year and got trounced, 51-0, in one of the most lopsided defeats in team history. Six weeks later, the Steelers would have to go to Cleveland to avoid being swept by their (at that point) fierce rival.

I don’t recall the identity of the Browns player that laid, sprawled out on the field on the muddy grass of Cleveland Municipal Stadium long after a play. I’m sure it was one of their more-explosive offensive players, perhaps Eric Metcalf, Ozzie Newsome or Webster Slaughter. As the Browns trainers rushed onto the field to tend to their injured star, 6-year-old me leapt off the couch. The loss of a big offensive weapon would for the Browns would be a huge boon for the Steelers’ chances of winning.

The Steelers ended up winning the game, but six-year-old me’s father was unimpressed with my behavior and I got something of a talking to. That’s when I learned that we don’t root for injuries in football. 

There’s a reason.

Now, I haven’t been around long enough to know the intentions of the men that molded the game of rugby into what we now call American football, but whether it was intentional from the start or acquired along the way, there is a gladiatorial spirit to the game.

The goal is of course to win, but that spirit demands that a victory be celebrated less if it is a hollow one. The goal of every team is not just to win, but to face — and defeat — the best each opponent has to throw at them.

That is why we hate the New England Patriots. The Patriots, for all of the success of their four Super Bowls and 14 division titles over the last 15 years, don’t succumb to the will of that gladiatorial spirit. They beat teams, not by overpowering them, not by being more athletic, or stronger, or tougher, but by outsmarting them.

Everything they do, from exotic formations and schemes to the things on the fringes of the rulebook (or over, some would say), is designed to give the team an advantage. In 2015, the Patriots flummoxed the Baltimore Ravens in the playoffs with a little-used but technically legal formation that confused the Baltimore defense. That was the same game in which it was initially revealed that the Patriots were using under-inflated footballs. The team had also been cited for illegal recording the practices of opposing teams and has been accused of tampering with visit radio equipment for years.

The reason we hate the Patriots is the same reason we don’t root for injuries. We’re not supposed to want an ill-gotten advantage. We’re supposed to want to face and beat the opponent’s best in a fair fight. The Patriots are healthy, so someone is going to get their wish.


Sean's Note: I think we also hate the Patriots because of Bill Belichick. He thinks he's smarter than everyone, and though he's probably right, he's a jerk about it. It also doesn't help that despite being so smart, he still had to cheat with Spygate. Tom Brady is also unlikeable. It's acknowledged that he's one of the best quarterbacks ever to play, but he's robotic. Besides appearing in Ted 2, has he every showed a personality?

Thanks again to Alan for his willingness to share his writing here. Please make sure you follow Alan on Twitter.

Donald Trump & Celebrity Indiana Endorsements

I promise that this post isn't too political. I went out on Monday night to play trivia and to watch game three of the Pens-Caps series. The restaurant also showed several baseball games, and there was one small TV airing Fox News. At one point, I glanced over and saw a headline about Trump and Cruz arguing over Mike Tyson's endorsement. I admit that I was intrigued by this storyline but not enough to watch it or even to try to find out more about this later.

Earlier in the day, though, I saw this video of East Liverpool, Ohio native and former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz endorsing Donald Trump:

Honored to have received the endorsement of Lou Holtz - a great guy! #INPrimary #Trump2016 pic.twitter.com/AeGyODb37O

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2016

I'm not sure how operating hotels and golf courses helps you be President (maybe North Korea will stop trying to make nuclear weapons in exchange for a Trump golf course and resort in Pyongyang?), but that's not the point of this post. Former Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight and former Purdue University basketball coach Gene Keady also endorsed Trump. I'm not sure if this was devised by the Trump campaign or if Holtz, Knight, and Keady are all really enthusiastic supporters of Trump, but the leading Republican candidate now has the endorsements of three of the most popular people in Indiana. (Apparently, Knute Rockne is a John Kasich guy, but hasn't come out publicly to endorse him.)

It seems to me that Trump is close to locking down Indiana in part due to these endorsements. However, to really clinch a victory, Trump should make sure to gain endorsements from a popular Indy car driver (is there still a Rahal or Andretti around?), Andrew Luck, Reggie Miller, Rik Smits, Antwaan Randle El, and most importantly, Larry Bird.

Of course, Trump probably shouldn't mention on the campaign trail that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady supports him. That won't go over well in Indiana.

Is Tom Brady In The Fitz And The Tantrums Video?

While the answer is clearly no, the main character that is not Fitz or a Tantrum sort of looks like Tom Brady in the video for The Walker, right? A little bit? Even if the answer is no, the video is even more entertaining if you think of the guy as Tom Brady.



Overall, I really like this song. I'm dating myself here, but the message of the song reminds me of Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder. Yes, I really am dating myself.

Traveler IQ Challenge and Referrals

Over the weekend, I mentioned my addiction to the Traveler IQ Challenge. The same site also has about a dozen other quizzes including the USA Challenge and UNESCO sites. I earned a score of 113,735 (Level 8; traveler IQ of 126) on the USA Challenge and 587,525 (Level 10; traveler IQ of 102) with UNESCO sites. In full disclosure, I failed miserably in my first attempt at the UNESCO quiz as Henderson Island, UK is not even near Europe.

I haven’t done this in a while, but here are real searches (usually from Google) that real people used to find and visit this place.

Do the Spice Girls mention the Packers in a song?
Unless David Beckham joined the Packers, I’m going to guess no.

Did Debbie Gibson go to Ithaca College?
I wish.

"What is wrong with Katie Holmes"
Tom Cruise is too easy of an answer, right?

What's going on with Joe Hardy from 84 Lumber
Last I heard, the 84-year-old Hardy (he may be 85 at this point) divorced his third wife, 23-year-old Kristin Georgi, after only four months of marriage. I really thought they would make it.

Why do people hat Hillary
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Clinton wear a hat. Maybe a lot of people dislike Clinton because of the vast right-wing haberdasher conspiracy against her.

Why are people so hard on Clinton
This seems like an inappropriate question.

Jaguars Mating
I think this aired on Animal Planet after Puppy Bowl IV.

"looks heavier" Tom Brady
So that’s why the Patriots lost the Super Bowl!

Finally, how exactly did Sean’s Ramblings end up on a Star Trek message board debate about Hillary Clinton?

Super Bowl XLII Notes

Everything has already been said and written about this year's New York Giants-New England Patriots Super Bowl, but I want to add my two cents anyway.

If you were tired of Peyton Manning commercials, prepare yourself for many Eli Manning commercials or more advertisements featuring both Manning brothers.

David Tyree's amazing catch was Swann-esque. (Swann as a wide reciever; not as a candidate for Pennsylvania's Governor.)

In the third quarter, the Patriots had a 4th and 13 from the Giants 32 and decided to go for it. Why not try for a 49 or 50-yard field goal? If you have that little confidence that your 2nd year kicker can't make a field goal from that distance in a dome, you need to get a new kicker.

Bill Belichick's short-sleeve sweatshirt looked silly.

Earlier this week, Plaxico Burress predicted a 23-17 victory for his Giants. Tom Brady's response: "We're only going to score 17 points?" No, you only scored 14 points.

When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell came to the podium to present the Vince Lombardi trophy, I thought he was going to say, "To Arlen Specter, I'll call you in a few days. Please get off my back."

Congratulations to the New York Giants! A nation is extremely happy that you defeated the Patriots!