Effective immediately, you now are required to log into the site in order to participate in the Sound Off chat. We’ll see how it goes this week before deciding whether to make this change permanent.
I do not want to alienate or lose any participants, but I do want to encourage you to log in. We kept the Sound Off open as a convenience for people so they would not have to log in, but we still expected participants to identify themselves in some meaningful way. Identification is important in order to provide the continuity necessary to facilitate communication. Really there has never been a legitimate excuse for refusing to provide a consistent identifier since these names allowed you to remain fully anonymous if you so wished.
Too many people not only declined to log in but also declined to replace their system generated name with something more recognizable. I invited people to explain themselves but nobody provided a legitimate reason for failing to type in a unique name, and those users continued to ignore my requests for compliance with this simple and unobtrusive request.
I have found the contributions from these “generic” users to be interesting and relevant, so I implore them to continue to participate by creating a login account. You can be assured that your real identity will remain fully secure, so there is no reason to not do it.
Anyone having trouble creating an account or logging in is welcome to email me at steelballs@thenetmail.com.
Alas, a guarantee from Chris Simms could be the kiss of death. 80% of his picks last week were wrong.
On the other hand, the only one he got right was Steelers – 49ers, so there’s that.
Time to kick Shady from the home page. Enjoy a few highlights from Sunday.
Vince Williams does the Heinz Leap.
Three 49ers eat dirt in vain attempt to stop AB.
Shazier leads the new swag emerging from young Steelers defense.
Ya want summa dis?
HeyBey steps up in the absence of Bryant.
Well now that the travesty that was the preseason is behind us, the time is upon us to fulfill the seminal purpose of Steel Balls, which is to predict the results of the new season.
Those seeking bragging rights must submit entries in the comment section below. You must predict at least the overall record of the Steelers and for tiebreakers, the records and finishing positions of the other AFCN teams.
As always, the winner will be chosen by your humble but benevolent dictator at his sole discretion.
Good luck!
Hopefully someone better than Grad + Landry will become available from a training camp cut by the August 25 or September 4 cut down dates. Here is the current depth chart across the NFL.
Speaking of New Horizons…
The fact that Pluto is the furthest known outpost of Steelers Nation solidifies the argument that Pluto should be considered a planet once again. Although it’s small, Pluto has more planetary character than Mercury. Pluto has interesting structure with a surface littered with frozen gases and mountains of ice, and even has a thin atmosphere. It also has five moons. Mercury is a burnt cinder with nothing interesting at all with no atmosphere, much like downtown Baltimore. It’s basically a big space rock. Pluto’s orbit is eccentric, but that shouldn’t be an issue. The word planet means “wandering body”. A planet could be free floating in space without orbiting a star and it would still be considered a planet, so the orbit should not matter. The argument that a planet should have cleared its “neighborhood” of competing rocks is also arbitrary. All of the inner planets, including Earth, had their neighborhoods cleared thanks to the Sun and Jupiter which is cheating like a Patriot. Poor Pluto has been doing that job all on its own, with maybe an occasional assist from Neptune. I say if you are spherical, have at least some atmosphere and diverse surface features, you ought to be a planet. If you need to kick one to the curb, it should be that chunk of charcoal Mercury.
