Steel Balls

Allow me to extend a humble thank you to the teeming hordes of miscreants who have graced this site with their boundless charm, rapier-like wit, and prescient insight into all things Steelers, for these past ten non-losing seasons.

We began this enterprise as a response to the P-G paywall, and to have a place to compare opinions and predictions, and now we are only a few weeks away from what may be a momentous NFL draft event where we can once again prove just how much more we know than the professionals.

We’ve had a lot of fun over the years, but we still have much yet to be accomplished, beginning with a jointly-enjoyed Super Bowl appearance and championship.

I poured through our user list, which numbers well over 1800 thanks largely to Russian spam bots, to try to extract a list of legitimate users. I may have deleted some that were legit, but here is my best guess at our participant list over the years. Here they are, in order of registration.

copanut
abennihana
jeffmi
steelerfan58
drock
ChicoSteelersFan
BGINTN
steelers1
MWalsh26
Tuskegee_Brown
TomPaulBillyBob
mack
tennbob
Earl
STILLERS35
craig
Steeltyke
Army01
steelerfan
JMS55
malsor
J A M E S H
EstimatedProphet
saneman
ktyoung
Clubber
cerone
BlitzBurghDude
jac
gsmaroff
floyd3421
fatxbrian
hksteelerfan
RickinLA
Black and Gold Foo
endaround
stillers_35
Steeler_in_VZ
Toadsly
Poz
Froggy
testname
sixter
bgigli
Reacher
JoeSlice
Pete
Steeler 1950
afrazier9
JimHim
Steelergill66
steelddiddy
jconroy
WritersRock
reddog
pubunchka
SteelerFanBudMan
blackanyellow
tobiathan
Fansincebubbywouldntmopup
kalel1199
kingribel
BigJ
Ravenslayer
sean.willison
Bill Strickland
davesdogs
Bill S
BiggiePops67
kedorfman
HetBob
ktalk
Stu
captainnasty86
kordellStewart
Steelers252006
dberry731
justjack1961
diamondback13
Miguelipto
sdsteel
moose
GodfatherofPittsburgh
72Steel
mikeflores16
eneg
Bilbo_shaggins80
elesher43
therealdonaldtrump
DumbCrackerDouche
Tomee4758

+1

I know my fellow Ballers enjoyed the play and may also enjoy the opportunity for a signed memento from TSE.

+5

Now that the NFL 2017 season has officially come to a close, we put our Steel Balls supercomputers to work crunching numbers to determine the winner of the coveted LamBalldi Trophy. MWalsh defeated last year’s winner (Army01) by a hair. The race was so close, in order to reach the final result we had to delve into tie breakers.

As for the rest of us, well, it was a sad showing. Two participants (kalel1199 and mwalsh) correctly guessed the final season wins total for the Steelers (13), and another six of us (copanut, tuskeegee_brown, tompaulbillybob, army01, estimatedprophet, and tennbob) were off by only one win. However it should not come as a shock that the Browns were the undoing of the majority of us who incorrectly guessed that the Browns would finally put all of their myriad high draft picks to some use. Boy, were we wrong.

Earl was the most pessimistic (10 Steelers wins) and jamesh the most optimistic (16 wins). Go figure. Who could have ever guessed such soul-mates could have such opposing world views?

Getting back to our winner and runner-up, both had exceptionally strong regular season predictions, with mwalsh nailing the Steelers, Ravens, and Bengals, and only whiffing on the Browns, while army01 was slightly more accurate on playoff wins. As a result they both ended up with 7 points and we had to go to the first tiebreaker where we look at the predicted game by game results. Even that was close, with mwalsh guessing 12 games correctly, compared to 11 for army01.

The full results are summarized below. As for now, cheers to mwalsh, while the rest of us lick our wounds and get ready for our springtime draft predictions.

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