In honor of Festivus ( yes I know there's a thread on that elsewhere, but indulge me) here's a place to air grievances within the family.
I'll start. And I'm directing this at many Steeler fans who bought into the myth that anytime Ben passes more than 30 times the Steelers are in dire straights.This comes from a horrible process I refer to as "backfitting". Backfitting in sports is the process where some geek goes over multiple box scores and tries to find common and generally irrelevant links that occurred in these losses and then and goes and assigns disproportionate relevance to whatever stat they dig up. As is true with most cases of selective backfitting where other relevant going's on weren't considered in drawing a conclusion it hardly ever works going forward. Thus this explains why trend players generally go broke! And of course as we know the last two seasons have blown this stupid little theory completely out of the water!
Of course this little stat was generally trotted out to make the case that Ben was nothing more than a game manager.The less Ben the better so to speak. Of course what this nitwit theory failed to take into account was more often than not the Steelers would use the pass to build up a lead, and then revert to "Marty-ball" aka take the air out of the ball to preserve the lead. And the way those teams were built and the way the NFL enforced it's rules a few years back it made some sense them. But getting back to the idiocy of the theory in the first place as it related to Ben's abilities or lack thereof. The AFC playoff run of 2005 perfectly illustrates my case. Ben played brilliantly in all 3 AFC playoff games. Yet in none of the 3 games did he have 30 pass attempts. But here's the thing take the Colt's game for example, he had a total of 24 pass attempts. But 14 came in the first quarter while he staked the Steelers to a 14-0 lead. That the Steelers only chose to pass 4 times in the second half could have cost them the game. A game they controlled at the line of scrimmage the entire day. Next came the AFC title game in Denver. Ben passed 17 times in the first half helping stake the Steelers to a 24-3 lead. He ended up with 29 attempts. Unless my math is faulty if the Steelers had chose to play at the same tempo both halves Ben would have easily got to 30 attempts.
I could go on. I can find dozens of wins where Ben would pass the ball 20+ times in the first 30-35 minutes establishing the Steelers offensive momentum, then the passing game would be put on ice until the next week. But regardless, the numbskulls wouldn't relent. We even had the case made on this board as recently as last year ( before the December run to the playoffs) that anytime the Steelers needed to pass more than 30 times Ben would turn into Dr. Hyde and we had no chance to ever win with a pass happy game plan!
Anywhere there's my rant. Feel free to add your own or comment on mine.
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Originally Posted by msafford
Enthroned Into The Good Old Boys Club - 2024 
