This Week, My Friends Will Call Me a Traitor

It rolls around every four years. It's a time when I choose my favorite team over the hometown team and get a lot of trash talk from my friends. It's time for the Steelers to play the Rams. And even though the Steelers winning the game would serve both teams best, the Steelers for playoff position and the Rams for draft position, it will still look like a betrayal to many of my friends.

When watching your team, even if it would be better for your team to lose, it's still difficult not to get caught up in the game and find yourself cheering for your team. It happened to me, just last week. I attended the Rams/Bengals tilt with my friends Sam, Matt, and their friend Craig. Going into the game, I certainly was hoping for a Rams loss. Winning could do the Rams no good and I was hoping for Cincinnati to get on a roll heading into their Week 17 match up with the Ravens. But after being in the Ed Jones Dome with thousands of Bengals fans and witnessing the Rams getting hosed by the refs on one of the Bengals' two touchdown drives, it still ticked me off to watch the Rams lose to them. So while it's all well and good for my friends to say they don't care about this week's game, I'm certain that if the Rams were to somehow pull ahead, I'd receive a drove of text messages about it. As for the Rams, I don't expect them to produce much on the field, but maybe we'll get another gem from Harvey Dahl (video below).

The Rams game was excruciating aside from Dahl's choice words, which livened up the stadium. The bright side was, I still had my favorite team, the Steelers, for a fall back. I wore my Pittsburgh cap to the game and didn't get a word of smack talk from any Bengals fans. It's good to have a back up.

I hope the Steelers realize that this week and decide to sit Ben Roethlisberger. He looked awful on Monday night against the 49ers and let's face it, the Steelers' defense alone should be enough to defeat this year's pitiful version of the Rams. Stick Charlie Batch in there. Have him hand of the ball to a solid running back in Rashard Mendenhall and just run it down the throat of the Rams, who have the worst rushing defense in the league (It's worse than the Raptors' new alternate uniforms). The Steelers can probably knock off the Browns in Week 17 with Batch in there too, but I'm fine with Big Ben playing again if he looks better. I just don't think it's worth risking your starting quarterback when in all likelihood, you can win without him, because in the playoffs, they won't win without him.

A quick side note for hockey fans: if you haven't been following HBO's show, 24/7, which follows the two clubs on the way to the Winter Classic (the Rangers and Flyers this year), you probably missed this clip of Flyers goalie Ilya Bryzgalov. I was on the floor the first time I watched it and it literally had me rolling. It's definitely a show worth watching if you have HBO (Or I could just be realistic and say the internet, as I'm sure it's floating around somewhere). Enjoy, eh?!