Saturday Night Steelers Open Thread: Training Camp Week Edition

TSF has the open thread tonight...

Well, here we are - it’s the last weekend of The Dead Zone, that time in the football season between the draft and training camp when even the NFL brain trust can’t figure out a way to feed us overpackaged content to keep us entertained. Training camp starts on Tuesday and I’m sure football writers at BTSC, The Other Blog Site, and everywhere else are happy as all H-E-double-hockey-sticks to have real football content to capture our attention again.

At any rate, it’s time for your last episode of 2022 Dead-Zone Open Thread, brought to you again this week by TSF. As they say in Steeler Nation, here we go:

1. Mike Tomlin has been known for his penchant to assign nicknames to his players. An innocuous example would be the moniker “Dirty Red” that he gave to Tyler Matakevich. Often times, though, Tomlin uses nicknames to make a point. Remember the nickname “One Trick Pony” that accompanied Mike Wallace for pretty much his entire career, courtesy of Coach Tomlin. And who can forget “Abdullah the Butcher”, the nickname Tomlin used in a desperate attempt to toughen up the image of the most inaptly named offensive lineman in the history of offensive linemen, Guy Whimper. For our first question tonight, your assignment is to channel your innermost Mike Tomlin and assign a creative nickname to one of the Steelers new players (draftees, UDFAs, veteran free agents). If you have trouble, you can, for part marks, expand your options to include returning players from last season.

2. Plenty of ink and Internet traffic has been expended on debating who will win the QB competition for the Steelers this year. There was a comment in an article this week that insightfully pointed out that what matters is not who starts the season at QB for the Steelers, but rather who finishes the season as the starter. In your opinion, who will be the starting QB for the Steelers at the end of season? And by that I’m not talking about the guy getting a start to finish the season in a meaningless game, but rather the guy generally recognized starting QB.

3. I noticed this week a number of articles in the news about the Cleveland Browns and what they are doing to recover the mess that they’ve made of this season after signing the disgraced Deshaun Watson to replace Baker Mayfield, a guy they spent a #1 overall pick on a few years ago and then diligently tried to run out of town. It is staggering to contemplate the number of decision points in this entire saga, and each time the Browns made probably the worst possible decision that you could possibly imagine (and even a few that nobody else could imagine). Our own team is notable for not doing such things. That said, in the past 20 years, what was the worst management decision that the Steelers made? For this question, I am excluding draft and free agent bust-type decisions.

4. Now that training camp is upon us, many Steeler fans will make a pilgrimage to Latrobe to catch a few sessions. Have you ever made a sports pilgrimage? If so, tell us about it. If not, would you ever consider doing one, and if so, to where?

5. There is news floating around that NFL Sunday Ticket is moving away from DirecTV. Do you care?

That’s Saturday Night Five for today - see you in the comments section!

P.S. Next week you’ll get steelwoman as your host!