The Steelers Curse: A Neverending Hell

After surrendering a 13-0 lead to Indianapolis and giving up 30 straight points, it seemed Tomlin’s tenure was finally coming to an end but Tomlin is the luckiest man on Earth and once again found another parlor trick to save him: Mason Rudolph.

Yes, that Mason Rudolph.

Rudolph had once been seen as the heir apparent to Ben Roethlisberger but had been pushed aside for better options like the great Duck Hodges. He had been pinned to the bench for the last three seasons, seeing little game action and when the team signed Mitch Trubisky in free agency, it seemed clear Rudolph was no longer a part of the team’s future.

Alas, Mitch Trubisky is a terrible NFL quarterback and after three straight losses, Tomlin begrudgingly gave the ball to Rudolph.

As always seems to happen with Tomlin, unexpected events saved his job: Rudolph played like an NFL franchise quarterback, completing 74% of his passes at a high 9.7 yards-per-attempt, three touchdowns to no picks and an exemplar 118 passer rating in an offense designed to make things as hard as possible. Pittsburgh scored 34 and 30 points in Rudolph’s first two starts and ended the season on a three-game winning streak, once again sneaking into the playoffs and keeping Tomlin’s precious non-losing season stretch alive.

Rudolph demonstrated the composure to stay in the pocket and go through his progressions, the arm talent to throw deep completions (along the sidelines in particular) and an active willingness to go for it.

Rudolph’s post-game pressers were especially eye-opening. This sounded like a franchise quarterback: a man humbled by his past failures, a player who eagerly accepted responsibility for mistakes while dishing praise to his teammates. He conducted himself like a professional, a stark contrast to the players surrounding him. The maturity, the leadership qualities, the character..it was all there.

In the quagmire of Steelers football, Rudolph was one of the few bright spots of 2023. That is a player the Steelers should keep around. Is he a franchise quarterback? No but to see someone conduct themselves like a leader in the locker room outside of the usual suspects was rejuvenating.

Back to Reality

In exchange for once again squeaking their way into the postseason, the Steelers got the pleasure of playing the Buffalo Bills, captained by Josh Allen. With a black hole at middle linebacker and T.J. Watt out for the game with an MCL sprain, chances looked bleak for Pittsburgh, especially given their coach is Mike Tomlin, a man who regularly tells you who he is in the postseason.

If black and gold fans believed Tomlin would write a new story, they were poorly mistaken.

21-0 Buffalo before Pittsburgh bothered picking up the controller.

This is not new. Including Monday, Pittsburgh has been outscored 66-0 in the first quarter of their last five playoff games. Always unprepared.

Tomlin defenses also don’t play playoff football. They became the first team in the Super Bowl era to allow 30+ in five straight postseason games (Before the Bills game, it was 36+ in their last four). They were outscored 122-47 at halftime in those five contests.

With the 31-17 drubbing to Buffalo, 23 teams have now won a postseason game more recently than the Pittsburgh Steelers.

This is who Pittsburgh is now. They aren’t even the Steelers anymore.

They’re the Settlers. They settle.

They settle for non-losing seasons and getting stomped in the playoffs by real contenders. Sometimes, Pittsburgh doesn’t even bother making it to the postseason.

I could go on about so much more with this team.

I could drop stat after stat on this page until I ran out of ink.

I could link quote after quote from players over the years, criticizing referees (Pickens did this post-game) or the weather conditions or how the team lacks structure and discipline (Najee Harris did this post-game) or how injuries piled up and didn’t allow the team to compete (next man up mentality? What’s that?) or how they didn’t hit their stride at the right time or it was a casserole of a lot of issues.

Yet there are few constants that remain from their last playoff win seven years ago, January 15, 2017.

Tomlin Torture

Why does the team continue to look the same? Nearly the entire roster has been flipped and yet, year after year, same result.

Coach Mike Tomlin.

His post-game presser should be his lasting image in this city. After 90 seconds of questions from the media, Tomlin walked off the stage when a question about his contract began. He is about to be in the final year of his deal.

Fresh off being stomped in yet another early playoff ouster, Tomlin ran.

He runs from adversity at every opportunity like the Alice in Wonderland rabbit, opening door after door while quoting all of his famous lines that still make the media blush. “Accountability? Standards? I’ve got an important date to make. I don’t have time for this.”

Media, more nationally than locally, love Tomlin because he makes their job easy. A significant role of the press is fishing for quotes and most people are not naturally quotable. People don’t talk like they do in Hollywood movies.

Tomlin, on the other hand, is a natural public speaker. Those nuggets and tidbits come out left and right but between those lines are a lot of baloney. Sure, standard is the standard until it’s time to answer why the standard didn’t happen today. He’ll say something like, “We don’t focus on the rearview mirror, we focus on the road ahead of us and we’ll look to improve going forward.”

Hard to do that when you actively ignore failed approaches and continue to implement them. He operates more like a White House press secretary than a football coach, dodging poignant questions about pressing issues while countering with past campaign promises.

The national media in particular applaud him regularly for navigating his team through the trash every season when he is dumping a lot of the sewage in front of his own ship and some of the people he hired on the vessel are actively sabotaging.

Tomlin is the only coach in possibly all of sports who gets credit for starting his own fires. It’s like applauding an arsonist for putting his out and calling him a fearsome firefighter.

Whenever Tomlin falls, it’s because of the roster and coaching staff he assembled, the poor battle plan he designed, the mounting injuries that exist for every NFL team.

Whenever Tomlin wins, it’s, “Look at all the turmoil he was able to overcome! What a guy!”

He is currently held to an irreproachable standard: nothing wrong is because of him and every success is due to him. He is treated like an icon for losing back-to-back games to 2-10 football teams at home in five days.

Rooney Roulette

For the seventh straight season, the Pittsburgh Steelers haven’t won a playoff game, the longest drought since the merger and their five-game postseason losing streak is the longest in franchise history. The Browns finished above the Steelers in the division for the first time since 1989. It doesn’t get much worse than this.

But the reports began coming out not one week after getting demolished that Tomlin is expected to be extended again this offseason. I held off publishing this waiting for that announcement.

Art Rooney II is a terrible owner and his relatives before him weren’t great either.

The football world worships the Steelers for employing so few head coaches, applauding the stability of the organization but the illusion of stability is not stability.

Hall of Fame Coach Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls in six years with the 70’s Steelers. From 1980-1991, the Steelers went 93-91 under Noll. He won 10 games just once and won only two playoff games.

The 80’s were virtually a complete waste and it wasn’t just because of the talent in the locker room. The Rooneys chose it. They have never learned how to let something go. Change is never an opportunity for improvement, only a chance at ruin and worse yields. They are terrified of losing what they have, so scared they’re unable to see when it’s slipping through their fingers.

By the way, Noll had to retire before any change was made. Pittsburgh hired Bill Cowher and the team immediately became competitive again, winning 10+ games five of Cowher’s first six years, including a Super Bowl appearance in year four. You’d think the Rooney’s might have learned a valuable lesson from that but nope.

With Tomlin’s extension despite his worst season seemingly inevitable, the 2020’s will play out like the 1980’s before them. The team will achieve meaningless accolades like non-losing seasons. It will be beaten like a drum when it has to enter the ring against a true opponent in the playoffs and that’s when the team bothers getting invited to the tournament.

The Steelers are a hamster on a wheel. They’ve been on the wheel for seven years but they’re sure if they keep running, the wheel will end soon.

They do not understand how wheels work.

Because despite all the football that’s played in Pittsburgh’s Black and Gold every year, this is the only measure that matters:

Last Five Playoff Games:

31-17 Bills

42-21 Chiefs

48-37 Browns

45-42 Jaguars

36-17 Patriots

My Time on Overwatch 2

After my career on Apex Legends (post linked), I wasn’t sure what to do with myself gaming-wise. When you spend three and a half years in a relationship, whether it’s with a person, a business or in this case, a game, it feels like your compass has lost its north. You’re used to doing things a certain way for so long that when you don’t have that north in your life anymore, you have to rediscover it.

Three and a half years is a very long time and I seriously considered stepping away from the console for a bit. Maybe I just needed a break from that part of my life.

In came Overwatch 2.

Like Apex, Overwatch is a class-based shooter, which made it immediately appetizing.

Unlike Call of Duty or Battlefield, class-based shooters offer unique characters, skill sets and personalities. Main-stream shooters remind you constantly you’re playing a video game. You have customizable loadouts, appearances and sprays but the voice lines and flair aren’t there. Grunt 1, Officer A, it all feels detached. Apex and Overwatch feel like stories.

I was a Moira main and I do not apologize for it. Mei was my queen, Torb my king and the more I played, the more diverse my hero catalog became.

I’m a marksman/support style player and that’s where I tended to reside in-game. I did not play much tank.

That changed over time. Reinhardt’s appearance reminded me of one of my favorite animes, Akame ga Kill. That’s something else main stream shooters don’t have: creative character design. I started maining Rein specifically cause of his look, not even his abilities.

Overwatch offers a wide range of play styles and during my year and a half on there, I explored them all. Some reminded me of my days on Team Fortress 2, an old PC game. Pharah was Soldier, Junkrat was Demoman, Widowmaker was Sniper, Torb was Engineer. It was reliving younger days.

By my time’s end on Overwatch, I regularly played Moira, Zenyatta, Rein, Mei, Torb, Brig, Reaper, Pharah, Dva, Zarya, Lifeweaver, Orisa, Kiriko, Widow, Junker Queen, Genji, Hanzo, Mercy, Sojourn and Junkrat.

Blizzard, unlike Respawn and Apex, seemed to listen to player feedback because many of my complaints with game balancing were often addressed. Of course, no game is perfect and some things, like Sombra’s existence, were never removed, though they did eventually rework her.

Overwatch felt like even more of a community that Apex did in some ways because of this open communication. It felt like all of us together wanted to make this game great.

In other ways, however, Overwatch was agonizing.

Why I Left

Part of a class-based shooter is class/hero counters. Some play styles specifically counter others and continuing to play said character and ignore the counters put in place by the developers to encourage game variety puts yourself and your team at a huge disadvantage. If you are one of the greats or even a very, very good player, you can overcome counters but an overwhelmingly large number of players are not that person. I wasn’t most of the time. Refusing to switch characters makes everything harder on yourself and your team and on Overwatch, more than on any game I’ve ever played, players would rather lose than switch when they’re getting decked in the mouth.

A significant portion of the player pool doesn’t play the game to win. They don’t even play to be competitive. They only care about playing a particular character and if they die a dozen times in a row, they don’t care. The world revolves around them. “Who cares if I’ve made the gaming experience absolutely miserable for my four teammates?”

Wide, complex maps like Apex Legends offers gives every character playability, even if they’re outside the meta. Overwatch maps are much more compact and they’re 5v5, not 60-pool lobbies.

Apex is built so that you can hardmain one hero if you wish. Overwatch is not. The developers themselves would tell you that.

So when you enter a ranked lobby and your tank picks Doomfist, you want to chuck your console into the river. The dude just chose to lose when there’s a Bastion on the other team.

People like this make Overwatch’s ranked system extremely hard to climb, harder than Apex. For all my complaints and bitterness towards Apex, Apex’s competitive play had safeguards in place to protect players from de-ranking if they got a teammate who decided to YOLO.

Overwatch has no such protections. Overwatch also doesn’t take play quality into account. If I played well on Apex but finished sixth, I could still gain rank points at certain levels. Higher up, I had to finish fourth. On Overwatch, I could go 50/5/5 with 25,000 damage and if I lose because of a teammate who doesn’t respect class counters, I de-rank. This is wildly unfair to me.

Despite Apex being a three-player game and running with randoms left me at a disadvantage, I could still compete. Overwatch actively hates solo players and have built their game to heavily favor pre-stacks, groups of players who squad into a lobby together.

In quick play games, you don’t have to be the best team. You just have to be the team who doesn’t have a rage-quitter on it.

What finally pushed me over the edge though, more than the self-centered players, was Overwatch’s strategy in releasing new heroes.

For three heroes out of four, Blizzard purposefully cranked their new characters’ viability to 12. Upon release, Rammatra’s ultimate was the strongest in the game, Illari was the best support character and now Mauga is the strongest overall hero on the server just weeks after drop.

This philosophy, that the newest character must be the game’s strongest by an overwhelming margin or no one will play them, is foolishly flawed. People enjoy new stuff, regardless of how viable it is. Ironically, Overwatch’s best hero introduction was Lifeweaver. He was weak initially and over the last few months, players got to witness his growth. Blizzard sees the Lifeweaver reveal as a failure.

When you release a character like Mauga, who has two Gatling guns with an over 300-bullet clip, no mobility but a decreased headshot multiplier and over 500 hit points, you’re telling the entire community the game revolves around him.

Mauga, as a tank, put out so much damage, you couldn’t outheal it. You had to play Zen/Ana or accept you were going to lose 70% of your games.

A hero who not virtually but completely eliminates half the heroes you can play at the selection screen is awful for the game.

I’m a Moira main who couldn’t play Moira because Moira doesn’t do enough healing to output Mauga’s damage but also doesn’t put out enough damage herself to take him down. I’m a Rein tank main who couldn’t play Rein because Mauga destroys my shield and still has 100 bullets to finish me off. I’m a marksman player who gets penalized for hitting headshots while Mauga sprays and prays and dominates the lobby.

The game became literally unplayable.

If I had genuine hope this would never happen again, I would still be on Overwatch but this was the third time Blizzard made a season of their game obnoxiously painful and stressful over character release philosophy. They nerfed Mauga mid-season and walked him back as they did with Rammatra and Illari before him but the next hero introduction will be the same. For weeks if not months, the game will once again become unplayable for a significant portion of characters, Blizzard will introduce nerfs to finally institute stability only to flip the table again around the bend.

For all those reasons, I’m out.

I reached master open queue and diamond all roles before I dipped so I accomplished what I wanted before this season from hell pushed me out the door.

I’m not sure what the next step of my gaming journey will look like but despite the bitterness I currently feel, I’m thankful for my chapter on Overwatch as I’m thankful for the Apex Legend I once was.

The One That Got Away

You were stunning.

I remember the first like it was yesterday

The first glance, the first hair flip, the first strut across the dance floor.

From the very moment, I was mesmerized

Spellbound, all the cliches are true.

Entranced, written into the storybooks and lovesick novels.

A reality in a fairy tale or a fairy tale in a reality?

I was never one to be impressed

My attention is not so easily attracted and harder still to hold onto

But as the first word broke your lips, I heard it.

When you hear the right chord progression

Or the right taste comes across your palette

You don’t just feel it. You sense it.

I’d never been so sure of something in my life.

You were a diamond.

Your laugh was a melody I couldn’t quit

A shot of adrenaline to my day.

You stoked the embers of my being

Made my fire burn like it never had

Like I didn’t know it could.

My light was always passionate

But now it roared with newfound fervor

Burned not red but a deep blue

Lively, energetic and most of all, hopeful.

Your presence alone was a spark.

Your eyes made me seen.

Your ears gave my voice bravado.

Your mind made me known.

But you were never mine.

I never felt I deserved you and so it didn’t bother me.

Being given the time of day felt like a blessing.

I idolized you. I really thought you were perfect.

I never saw aiding you in your studies as a chore.

I viewed it as a responsibility, something I owed you.

Lending my ear to your struggles was just something a good friend would do.

Supporting you wasn’t an obligation.

It was something I wanted to do.

I wanted to see you win

Because I believed you could go further than I would ever make it.

As a child, everyone around me wanted to be Batman.

Everyone wants to be the hero, the protagonist of life.

I always wanted to be Robin, the sidekick

The one who never got the respect or the credit

And never asked for it

The one who lifted others

So they could reach higher.

I was the Beast

Maligned and misunderstood

Ostracized and shunned

Labeled and characterized.

I was The Invisible Man.

Unseen but seen through

A concept more than a person

An NPC more than a character

A masked vigilante rather than a memorable face.

You were my Belle.

The first person in so many years

To not just notice me

But see me.

People don’t understand what a gift that is

To be recognized as you are.

It is one of life’s greatest treasures.

In exchange for that, I was willing to do nearly anything.

As long as it didn’t betray who I was, it was on the table.

I was willing to sacrifice everything for your aspirations.

I poured so much of my energy into you

And saved none for myself.

And then that rodent dumped you

And you shattered like glass

Withdrew from the world.

Your light died.

You wouldn’t accept that all you were was in spite of that thing, not because of it

But over many months, I watched you, my rose, wither away.

You closed the shutters on your windows

You locked the door

And you stopped dancing.

You moved back home to chase that cesspool of a creature

A being that never treated you with a shred of respect or dignity.

I never heard from you again.

For years, I longed for that voice to reverberate in my ears again

For my heart, a dormant volcano, to become active again.

I’ve questioned what I did wrong to lose you.

For a decade, I’ve shamed myself

For letting you crumble

For not being strong enough to lift you up.

”How did you let her get away?”

But the truth is, you weren’t the one who got away.

I was.

It’s taken me so long in life to see my own value

But I know now there isn’t anything I could have done

To lift you above yourself.

You weren’t Batman.

You were a damsel in distress who encouraged said distress.

You had the power to be Batman and Robin

But you stepped in your own way.

You hooked your wagon to people who not only didn’t support you

But sucked the life out of you.

You saw me for me but also didn’t.

You took my dedication, character and loyalty for granted.

You saw my perspective, my selflessness, my humility

And thought it wasn’t enough.

The truth is, I am the Batman of my story. I just didn’t know it.

We all are the heroes of our stories, the protagonists of our journey

Whether we want to be or not.

With great power comes great responsibility

And it’s much easier to shed the responsibility you have to yourself

Than it is to embrace it.

You are as strong, or as weak, as you allow yourself to be.

I saw you as above me

When really, I looked up at you from above.

All that I believed you could accomplish

Is the self-belief I never allowed myself.

So I no longer regret those decisions.

The days I longed for you in my life are past.

I’ve realized that melody I heard when you spoke?

That melody was mine.

The feelings I had of self-acceptance

Are inside myself.

The passion and energy I felt is what I created, not others.

You cannot rely on people for self-worth, for outside validation.

Your identity verifies your validity.

I’m the one who got away.

I hope as age and wisdom come to you

As it comes to us all

You’re able to appreciate the rose you once had.

End of an Era: Belichick/Saban

When we are young, we dream and children overwhelmingly do not dream small: professional athlete, astronaut, president, actor, all reachable but all lofty. Regardless of what your goal is in life, it never comes easy. It always pushes you harder than you were prepared for and those integral moments, when you’re so far beyond exasperated and beginning to doubt is when you learn who you are and what you’re willing to do to achieve.

When you accomplish, I think we fantasize there’ll be mass joy and celebration and the work will be over but I’d argue the grind gets even more severe trying to maintain that level. There’s a reason people don’t live on Mount Everest.

For decades, Bill Belichick and Nick Saban have been living on a peak unapologetically, commanded with a Zeus-like grip and innovated to survive their battle against time. You can’t get stuck in your ways. Life will move forward with or without you. Belichick’s end in New England is because he became hardened to change and the results due to refusal to change are to be expected.

Saban, meanwhile, has retired, called it a career at Alabama. For years, I’ve hated Alabama and I’d argue Alabama is one of the many reasons I don’t watch college football. When all the best recruits go to the best coaches and the best programs, the sport becomes heavily unbalanced. The college football season is monotonous because we all know at the end of the season the usual suspects will be raring to go to the playoff: a west coast school that won’t be able to compete with Big Ten size and SEC talent, a minimum of one Big Ten school, usually Ohio State or Michigan and a SEC school, usually Alabama or Georgia. The fourth team doesn’t matter, they’re already out.

And so the stories written in college football history books feel known before the season ever starts. The times of little schools like Boise State doing something meaningful in a prime-time bowl game are long gone. The big boys are too big now.

But this is a problem with the structure of college football, not Saban. The truth is, as much as I hate Alabama, that hate over his lengthy career has turned to annoyed respect. To excel repeatedly regardless of the tools or talents at your disposal takes character and dedication.

I’d say the same of Belichick. As a Steelers fan, you’re taught to hate New England when in reality, New England is just better at most football things for the last two-plus decades. Brady is the greatest the sport has ever seen and Bill crafted game plans tailored to his roster. Attention to detail, discipline and the ability to see talent in prospects other organizations didn’t. Belichick once said he didn’t look for what players couldn’t do. What can they do and how can those things potentially help us?

As the Patriots kept winning, I found great admiration for Brady and Belichick. What they were doing reached a never-before-reached precipice. How could I not respect them?

Everyone starts as a Rocky but too much success and people start to see Goliath: they want you torn down. Neither Saban nor Belichick ever let their success develop apathy nor did they allow ego or arrogance to corrupt their organization. They stayed in their lane with one singular focus: excellence.

While I still found enjoyment when they faltered, specifically Saban (that Iron Bowl ending was fantastic), I knew these two were as close to immortal in sports as you could be: iconic, inevitable and timeless.

With Belichick onto his last chapter and Saban off the reserve entirely, it’s natural to wonder who may step into their spotlight but I hope the world over the next few weeks takes the time to relive their journey. Stories like theirs have a lot of lessons for all of us. It would be a great error to have lived in their time and not learned.