Preseason Game 1 Quick Hits

As I sat here chomping down on my delicious 99-cent Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers from Wendy’s, I debated what to do for tonight’s game recap. It’s no secret that you miss nuances of the game (and I love me some nuances) when you go see it live, so obviously I can’t go into my preferred level of detail. But I will offer you a roughly chronological list of highlights from my experience tonight.

• I was going to do an Empty-Netters style picture journal where my friend and I park in a garage dahntahn and we walk across the bridge and along the river to the stadium… but I didn’t.
• Anthony Madison led the team’s charge onto the field before they brought out the starters one-by-one. That doesn’t mean anything, I just thought he was a weird guy to do it.
• Speaking of, only the defense was announced starter-by-starter, with Foote, Timmons, and Farrior all labelled starting ILBs.
• Troy Polamalu was announced last and he got the loudest ovation by far.
• From where I was, I couldn’t really tell if the crowd had a reaction to Ben Roethlisberger, especially since he never took the field.
• Totally did not even realize both of the teams are Dick LeBeau’s until they honored him before the coin toss. Huge love from the crowd.
• Distinct lack of a Renegade montage.

And as for the actual football aspect of a football game:

• Leftwich looked bad. The whole first team offense looked bad. The Lion defense is definitely improved, but it didn’t look good out there to get things rolling.
• On the defensive side, Lawrence Timmons was playing like a first-round pick seemingly every play. Nice to see Ryan Clark find a wayward football too.
• Daniel Sepulveda didn’t kick off the whole night as far as I could tell, but Jeff Reed did boot a couple of them pretty well. Jury=out.
• Keyaron Fox looked like a starter playing amongst second-teamers.
• Emmanuel Sanders made a very Ward-like catch on a hot read on third and short. Got the ball, took the hit, came up with the catch. First down.
• Antonio Brown’s TD came at the perfect time. Just as I was explaining to my friend (a predominant fan of hockey as opposed to football) how QBs read defenses and check for blitzers, knowing where his hot receiver is if things get dicey, and seeing if that receiver can take advantage of the blitzer’s absence in coverage, well… That’s exactly what happened. That was just a perfectly executed, great looking football play.

Oh, and the rain. If that rain had a fan page on Facebook, and it probably does because what doesn’t anymore, I would Like it for sure. When the game started, the stadium was packed. But as the rain came, a woman sitting a few rows behind me aptly pointed out, “Lookit all the fairweather fans leavin’ early! Yinz ain’t even real Stiller fans!” Well said, Pittsburgh accent. The sky opened and the rain was cold and violent. The diehards sat there through it all, watching every snap of an exhibition game against one of the worst franchises in professional sports.

Nothing better than seeing the fans that remained in the downpour immediately start a Here We Go chant while the rest of the “fans” hid inside. And then Isaac Redman scored a touchdown and it felt he scored it just for us.

Then came the lightning with 1:53 left in the first half. The teams scurried into the locker rooms and the fans were herded inside. We waited. We didn’t know how long we’d be inside. Some kid looked like Jarome Iginla. All we could do was wait for the storm to pass over…

45 minutes later (they just did halftime during this break), or something to that effect, we were allowed back into the open air. The rain had stopped and we enjoyed a cool evening (although we were soaking wet so “cool” felt a lot like “hypothermia”), or as some might call it, great football weather. And now that we had weeded out the weak fans, the remaining diehards got to enjoy our very own half of football, plus 1:53.

Telltale sign of the change in fans? In the first quarter, there’s some bumping between a Steeler receiver and a Lion DB in the end zone. Pass is dropped, no flag is thrown. The boos are deafening, because dammit touchdowns are important in August exhibition games! Same play happens in the third quarter, perhaps even a bit more questionable. Only minor boos are heard. That makes sense with the thinning crowd, but a guy sitting a couple of seats down from me looked over and he said, “You think that was pass interference?” to which I replied, “It was a little bit iffy but I’m giving the DB the benefit of the doubt here; I think he just made a good defensive play.” (And yes, I do use semicolons in speech) He agreed with my assessment. Those are the kinds of people that were still there. Reasonable ones. I was in heaven.

JERSEY SIGHTINGS:

Again, I’m not Seth Rorabaugh. He’s a professional. I didn’t get pictures of every jersey I saw, but I did take note of some of the better or more unusual ones:

• Kid in a Brian Urlacher jersey
• Byron Leftwich Jaguars
• A few Charlie Batch Lions jerseys.
• Actually a lot of Stafford jerseys too. Mega props to Lions fans that will travel to see their shitty team in a meaningless game.
• Guy in a blue Sidney Crosby jersey. Take that, people who wear Ward jerseys to Pens games!
• Kid in a Guerin jersey too.

We’ll have more in-depth preseason coverage in the coming week. Hopefully my DVR recorded the whole game and that lightning delay didn’t screw everything up. Either way, Steeler football is back. No better feeling.

Here We Go