The Steelers have maybe three good players, and they are all on offense. Every other piece of this team lands somewhere on the spectrum from "Amusingly Subpar" to "Neutron Star Made of Densely Packed Turds." The roster of no-name wild cards and septuagenarian holdovers is dwarfed in incompetence only by the oligarch ownership, the cap-clueless front office, and a coaching staff made entirely of dull platitudes. The Steelers seem to have a three-part strategy: (1) restructure every contract into a cap-consuming ouroboros; (2) have Antonio Brown; (3) close your eyes and hope the AFC North is bad enough that we get to lose another playoff game.
And through it all, the organization remains a fountain of utter bullshit, spouting retreads of the same "Steelers Football" brand language that rang true when it was a well-run perennial contender but is a bit hard to swallow in the wake of overlooked quarterback sex crimes, rampant personnel mismanagement, and perennial underachievement. But Steelers fans live by every word of it, because Steelers fans are the fucking worst.
Pick three insufferable fanbases. Let's say a Boston fan, a Philly fan, and a New York fan. I'd rather hang out with those three chumps than with three random Steelers fans. In the latter case, I wouldn't expect to make it five minutes before their constant complaints about Mike Tomlin descended into the ever-popular "I'm not racist, but..." format. I guess in defense of Steelers fans, having black men in charge of both our country and our football team is too much for their tiny Stegosaurus brains to process. If you ever get into a fight with a Steelers fan, just say "Obama is a great president, like Kordell Stewart was a great quarterback," and their head will literally explode.
The Steelers will not be good this year. But they will be infinitely better than these garbage fans deserve. And the worst part is, they'll probably still be decent enough that we won't notice what a gutter-traipsing sewer belch our team is. My strongest memory of the first Steelers game I ever attended (1996, age 9, against the Houston Oilers) is of the men's room at Three Rivers Stadium - loud, drunk yinzers peeing in troughs, in sinks, on themselves, chanting "Here we go, Steelers" and "If you shake it more than once, you're playing with it." That image will always represent this fanbase perfectly to me.
I love my city and I'm thankful for the sports successes we've had, but it embarrasses me every day to be associated with this seething latrine of a football community. An organization with a pretend moral compass that makes claim a proper way of doing things, and racist fans who eat up the bullshit and regurgitate it loudly to the masses, oblivious to their own terribleness...
You see where this is going, don't you? That's right. The Steelers are the St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL.
Except the Cardinals field nine players on defense, and I don't think the Steelers have that many.