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Join Date: Jun 2003
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A year old, but an interesting read.
Mother****in' Steelers
Posted: 2/3/2006 by: Jesse Lamovsky
Truly, all-encompassing
Some aspects of the NFL defy parity. With that in mind, let me tell you a little bit about the so-called rivalry between Your American Football Conference Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, and my American Football Conference tragedy, the Cleveland Browns.
There were two more meetings between the Browns and the Steelers in 2005, and two more un-G-dly beat-downs. The first came in a Sunday Night game at Heinz Field back in mid-November. It was the same old @#%$. Pittsburgh pounded out 159 yards on the ground without Bettis or Willie Parker getting a carry. Charlie Batch started for the injured Roethlisberger and was flawless (Steeler backup QB’s are always flawless against Cleveland; the Browns were almost single-handedly responsible for Tommy Maddox bamboozling people into thinking he was a decent NFL quarterback). Randle-el threw a touchdown pass to Hines Ward, the 19th consecutive time the Steelers have successfully executed a trick play against the Browns. Joey Porter kicked the dirt and talked much @#%$. Cowher’s chin stuck out like an abutment. Yinzers frantically waved those yellow rags of theirs. There was so much fellatio of the Steelers in the ESPN booth, it’s a surprise the game didn’t end with a cumshot. The final score was 34-21. It wasn’t even that close.
(I don’t know whose idea at ESPN it is to continually match Cleveland up with Pittsburgh and Baltimore in the only nationally televised game we get around here, but I wish they’d stop doing it. Or maybe it doesn’t matter, because generally whenever the Browns play, they get beat. The opponent might just be irrelevant. It’s like the old baseball story where the player hears the National Anthem, turns to a teammate, and says, @#%$! Every time they play that song, we lose.)
The second meeting, on Christmas Eve, now… that was special. The Browns had just moved to 5-9 on the season with a rainy road victory over Oakland, a victory that was lacking artistically, even by Cleveland standards. In other places a last-second win over a horrible Raider team might be taken with a large grain of salt. But some of us got to feeling a little bit sanguine. Hey, it was Cleveland’s first win in Oakland since 1973. Besides, the Browns had already won more games (one) than the entire previous season, and there were two whole weeks to go. Bring on the Steelers, some of us said. We want a piece of them!
We want a piece of the Steelers is right up there with You can't say Dallas doesn't love you today, Mr. President on the all-time Famous Last Words list.
Game starts, Pittsburgh kicks off. Browns go three-and-out; punt. Steelers take it right downfield and score when Bettis drags undersized, under-talented linebacker Ben Taylor into the end zone. At this point, any seasoned Browns fan knew the ****storm was coming. It was just a question of how rough it was going to be. It turned out to be rougher than I, for one, anticipated… and that’s bad. It was 14-0 at the end of the first quarter, 20-0 at halftime. With it 34-0 late, Charlie Batch supplied an added dollop of humiliation, going up top to former Brown Quincy “Stone Hands” Morgan for a touchdown. Steeler linebacker and Akron native James Harrison punctuated the 41-0 rout when he body-slammed a drunken Cleveland fan that went running onto the field in the fourth quarter. By the end of the game, the stadium had pretty much cleared of Browns fans, leaving Terrible Towel-waving Steeler backers in charge of the place. Me, I turned the game off after Willie Parker’s 80-yard run gave the Steelers a 27-0 lead right after halftime. I went and did something more worthwhile than watching the Browns: drinking and one-handed reading.
Said Browns cornerback Daylon McCutcheon after the game: “It's definitely the most embarrassing loss of my career." That isn't idle talk. Daylon has been here since '99. No desrespect intended, but the man, professionally, is on intimate terms with embarrassment.
(@#%$ Browns. I’m a Cleveland fan. I wouldn’t change it. But I swear, sometimes I think we deserve to never win a @#%$ thing. We lavish all sorts of attention on the Browns and ignore the Indians, unless we're whining about their payroll. There are Cleveland fans that refuse to come out to Tribe games because they, quote, don’t want to support a minor-league team. Seriously, I've seen this in print. Hafner, Peralta, Sizemore- bunch of ****in' minor leaguers, there. Dip****s. Rant over. Anyway…)
It's appropriate that the first game in the history of the New Browns was a 43-0 loss, at home, to Pittsburgh. Not only do the Steelers beat the Browns, they spay and neuter them as well. They emasculate them. It’s not like the Steelers have been beating Cleveland on Hail Marys the last decade. They generally just take the Browns and throw them around like rag dolls for three hours. Hines Ward regularly puts our team's linemen on ***** Street. Nobody told Pittsburgh the rivalry was dead. Cowher, Joey Porter and Co. haven’t gotten that memo. On Christmas Eve the Steelers were still throwing the ball downfield and sending blitzes at Charlie Frye with a five-touchdown lead. I believe they take this game personally. To my untrained eye they look “up” to play the Browns.
The Steelers=Michigan and the Browns=John Cooper without the recruiting ability. It's ugly.
The Browns are 3-17 against the Steelers since ’94. Pittsburgh has beaten the Browns twice in the playoffs in the last decade. The last year the Browns had a better record than the Steelers was 1989. You know that old saw about how tough it is to beat a team three times in a season? To paraphrase Sean Salisbury, hey, that's a buncha b.s. The Steelers have beaten the Browns three times in a season twice in the last decade.
Generally, there’s only one source of consolation for the Steeler-haters, and that’s watching them choke in the playoffs. But not this year. And Pittsburgh’s AFC Championship has inspired a mini-crisis among Browns fans.
Play action? Against this team? Are you mad?
In regards to the Steelers, Cleveland fans tend to break down into three very general categories. These aren’t hard-and-fast classifications; people are complex animals, and Browns fans can either be members of two or more of these camps at the same time. There are arguments among the various camps, and these disputes can get very acrimonious and bitter. Which isn't surprising. We're some bitter SOBs these days across the board.
The categories:
Old-School Browns Fans
These are the fans for which their second favorite team is whoever is playing Pittsburgh on any given Sunday. I call these fans Old School because I’m assuming the bulk of them were around during the ‘70s, during the period of the Dynastic Steelers. That period left a bad taste in the mouth of many a Browns fan. That Pittsburgh team got over on everyone, but they really got over on Cleveland.
For this group, there is no room for “respect” for Pittsburgh, for the Rooneys, for the way they play the game, whatever. The Steelers suck, Big Ben sucks, their fans are a bunch of toothless, inter-marrying, Carhartt-wearing, hillbillies who think the “@#%$-hair” is an actual unit of measurement, and that’s that.
Old School fans are inclined to hammer fellow Browns backers for what they feel is a lack of negative fervor toward the Steelers. They're always on the lookout for backsliders, constantly accusing their fellow Browns backers of being "fairweather" (a laughable charge, considering a generation has gone by since we saw any kind of fair weather around these parts). They are also inclined to propose boycotts on Cleveland-area stores that prominently display Steelers merchandise. So what if the Steelers are still playing and our season basically ended in Week One. It’s treason, dammit!
Into this category also go any Browns fans that lay smack on Steelers fans, the inevitable, all-encompassing “scoreboard” rebuttal be damned.
Realist Browns Fans
The happy medium: fans who have a healthy respect for the Pittsburgh organization, yet still consider them a rival (against all evidence) and pull against them any chance they get (except when they play Baltimore). I would put myself into this category, with one caveat: In the AFC Championship Game, I flat-out rooted for Pittsburgh. That’s right. The Broncos should never prosper. I, frankly, enjoyed the mewling of Mile High fans as they watched their team get taken apart in their own house. That it’s the Steelers who did it is incidental. I would root for Satan’s minions in Denver in an AFC Championship Game (not Baltimore, though). I’m sorry, but I have to be a hater like that.
It was nice to see Elway get a title. And yeah, the Broncos fans deserved one as well. Two, though?
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Cowher was driving very conservatively, and it was easy to predict how he was planning on getting to the stadium.
It seemed as if he was driving not to crash and relying on his tires to pound their way down the asphalt about 3 yards at a time.
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