The Pittsburgh Steelers Are Still A Brilliant Example Of Why The NFL Asked Them To Be America's Team In 1976

The Pittsburgh Steelers are an anomaly in professional football. They have had three coaches since 1969, two are in the Hall of Fame and Mike Tomlin is likely to join them at the end of his career. The team was founded by Art Rooney in 1933 and his grandson Art Rooney II is running the team almost 100 years later.

The Steelers have had one losing season this century and only seven losing seasons since they drafted Terry Bradshaw in 1970. Pittsburgh has never finished last in the AFC North. It hasn’t always been a smooth ride, but the Steelers have only played one game since 2004 when they were mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. The bottom line is that the Steelers are the most consistent team in professional sports.

The Steelers are truly "America's Team"

The Dallas Cowboys are covered endlessly on national sports talk shows. Skip Bayless has made a career at ESPN and Fox Sports turning national shows into discussing the Cowboys endlessly under the premise that they are "America’s Team." The truth is more complicated. The Cowboys haven’t been to a conference championship this century and the nickname is a hand-me-down.  

Dave Wannstedt interviewed for the Steelers’ head coaching job in 1992 to replace Chuck Noll. He was the defensive coordinator of the Dallas Cowboys. Wannstedt decided to lean on his resume as a key part of "America’s Team" in his interview when Dan Rooney corrected his perception about the Cowboys.

“Stop right there, let me tell you a little story,” Wannstedt quotes Dan Rooney. “In 1976, we beat the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl X. My Dad, the Chief as they called him, gets a call from Pete Rozelle the commissioner. ‘We are making our highlight tape; we want to name the Steelers 'America’s Team'.’”

Super Bowl X was the first time that two previous teams who had won the big game met in the Super Bowl. It was a close hard-fought game that saw the Steelers prevail 21-17 behind Lynn Swann’s acrobatic catches and LC Greenwood’s four sacks of Roger Staubach. The Steelers wore black and gold, but they represented the blue-collar town of Pittsburgh, and they didn’t apologize for it.

“The Chief took a puff of that cigar,” Rooney told Wannstedt. “Pete, let me tell you something. We are not 'America’s Team.' We are the Pittsburgh Steelers. Tex Schramm took that for Dallas and ran with it ever since.”

The Cowboys adopted the moniker officially after they defeated the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII. John Facenda and NFL Films broke out the recycled nickname in the 1978 Super Bowl highlights. Coincidentally, the Steelers met the Cowboys in a rematch in Super Bowl XIII and promptly defeated the league’s second-choice 35-31.

The rise of national sports debate shows began with ESPN’s First Take spending a lot of time talking about the most controversial NFL topics. The airwaves are now full of opinion and debate shows that do the same thing. The Pittsburgh Steelers are rarely controversial enough to penetrate the rotation. The Ben Roethlisberger, Le’Veon Bell, and Antonio Brown years generated plenty of coverage when it imploded.

Since that period, aside from Roethlisberger being washed up and Tomlin being underrated, the stories are few and far between. TJ Watt is the best defensive player on the planet, but is almost purposefully ignored nationally. He won the 2021 AP Defensive Player of the Year and tied the NFL single-season sack record and somehow receives less coverage than Myles Garrett and Micah Parsons who are fine players, but not in Watt’s class. In a recent list of likely Hall of Fame players released by The 33rd Team, Watt was not even ranked as a plausible nominee.

The Steelers’ road games might as well be neutral site affairs because the black and gold jerseys in the crowd stick out like a sore thumb. Pittsburgh travels so well that in 2019, the Los Angeles Chargers played Renegade during a Devlin Hodges road victory. No current NFL team can compete with the national following of the Steelers.

Pittsburgh refused to ratify the Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2011 on principle. They thought it gave the commissioner too much power before it was popular. They were also responsible for the Rooney Rule that required teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching positions. The rule is rarely used as it is intended, but it worked exactly as written when Tomlin was hired to replace Bill Cowher. 

The Steelers are a constant in an ever-changing world. Maybe that is why they have such an ardent following across the country. The organization is a rare example of what could be and the reality of what is. Almost everything else that happens nationally somehow devolves into politics. So much divides us in 2023, it is nice to know that Steelers football is still a refuge for a large portion of the country.

What do you think, Steeler Nation? Could the country benefit from the Pittsburgh Steelers’ example? Please comment below or on my Twitter @thebubbasq.

#SteelerNation