IX - Sean Conboy, who writes for Pittsburgh Magazine, weighs in with a nice feature commentary on the hiring of Todd Haley as the new offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and why fans should not be worried about any potential beef between he and Ben Roethlisberger.
X - Dermontti Dawson has always been a great interview. Now he gets to conduct an interview as a soon-to-be Hall of Famer. The longtime standout center for the Steelers will be enshrined in Canton this coming summer.
XIII - What do you think? Will Jerricho Cotchery receive a multi-year contract offer from the Pittsburgh Steelers? Is his future with the six-time Super Bowl champions directly related to the future of Hines Ward? I'm not sure they need to be necessarily because I think the Steelers will prove to be cautious with investing in Emmanuel Sanders in the long run, and because you never know how expensive Mike Wallace might prove to be on the open market.
XIV - It was before my time, or at least before professional football was a regular part of my life, but before there was Hard Knocks, HBO had a football show called 1st & 10 that ran for six seasons. The series was not a documentary franchise though.
This show ran on HBO for six seasons, starting in 1984. Since the whole collection only cost $5.99 on Amazon, I figured I would take a look and maybe there would be something there, you know? Not something as in "secretly changed television forever"-to reiterate, this is a show about a Pro Football team called the California Bulls starring Delta Burke and O.J. Simpson and a pre-Crypt Keeper John Kassir and pre-Law and Order: Sex Creeps Christopher Meloni-but maybe something like how Patton Oswalt recommended this show with the brother from Everybody Loves Raymond that ran on FOX for a few years, ‘Til Death, because it got entertainingly weird in later years, possibly because the writers knew the show was doomed.
Who remembers this?
XL - The article was published over the weekend, but do you agree with the authors at Grantland who posited that the slow but steady death of football is upon us? I must say, I agree, and though I can't search through the site's archives to find the link, I remember writing (in less detail or as creatively) two years ago that we were experiencing the beginning of the end of football, as we know it, as research about the lasting impacts associated with repeated head trauma began piling up.
XLIII - In the event that violence continues to be regulated out of the game, might as well enjoy the physical, bone-crunching hits that make us both cringe and cheer while we can.