Talk about your clash of cultures.
The Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks are not only far apart on the map, they're about as far apart on the football map as you can get.
The Steelers are a historic NFL franchise. They've been around for 73 years. They've won four Super Bowls. They represent the hard-working steel millers. They play tough, smash-mouth football, fueled by a strong defense and a power running game. They were molded by rugged players of yesteryear, such as Mean Joe Greene, who anchored the famed Steel Curtain.
The team is owned by the Rooney family, whose patriarch, the late Art Rooney, bought the club in 1933 for $2,500 (not a bad value, by the way).
Even today, their stars are guys named the Bus and Big Ben (fitting, since this is Super Bowl XL). They even took the tough road to the Super Bowl, becoming the first team in league history to defeat the top three seeds in its conference to reach the title game. They ooze toughness.
The Seahawks are playing in their first Super Bowl game. The team was in its first years of existence during Pittsburgh's dynasty in the late 1970s. They are owned by billionaire Paul Allen, the guy who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and paid $200 million for the team in 1997. They represent the coffeehouse dwellers and the grunge bands.
Even their mascot is a fraud. Eagles, Falcons, Ravens, and Cardinals are the real deal, but there simply is no such bird as a seahawk. At home games, they have an augur hawk fly around the stadium, and there are many other kinds of hawks, and plenty of seabirds reside in the Pacific Northwest, but a seahawk doesn't exist. They made it up.
They took the easy road to the Super Bowl as the top seed in the weaker NFC, only needing to beat the fifth- and sixth-seeded teams in their conference to advance.
Their team itself is molded primarily by the trendy West Coast passing offense. They have perhaps the game's top overall runner in Shaun Alexander, who set an NFL record for touchdowns this season, but still, Mike Holmgren's squads have always been known for their passing game, and this team is no exception. It follows the typical West Coast formula—high-octane offense, and enough defense to get by, although Seattle has played well on the defensive side in the postseason, particularly in their NFC Championship rout of Carolina.
Yep, it's Starbucks vs. Iron City, in Motown. But the big news out this week isn't about the clash of cultures between the city that grinds steel and the one that grinds coffee—it's about the clash of colors.
Even though the Steelers have been designated by the league as the "home" team, coach Bill Cowher announced that his club will wear their white road jerseys in the Super Bowl, rather than the traditional black-and-gold the team sports at Heinz Field. His claim is that he considers this a road game, but in truth, he probably wants to keep the momentum that his team has built during its road victories in each of the past three weeks.
It sounds silly, but Cowher fielded numerous questions about the choice to wear white during Tuesday's news conference, prompting him to ask a reporter if he wanted to know what shoes Cowher was planning to wear.
The sad part is, somewhere, someone probably does. So it is with the hype the extra week of the Super Bowl often creates. But no matter which side of the map you're rooting for— it's worth the wait, isn't it?
Sal DeFilippo likes to drink coffee while he bends steel.