Steelers' Gay, Chiefs' Smith speak at Rickards' banquet
Rudy Hubbard wanted past football players to remain connected to Rickards High when he became the schools' head coach a little less than one year ago.
Often, Hubbard says, former players end their connection to the team and school when a new coach enters the picture.
So when he learned that Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback William Gay and Kansas City Chief Kolby Smith were working out with his football players last summer, Hubbard personally extended an invitation to the two 2003 Rickards graduates: Whenever they wanted, they were welcome to return as members of the Raider football family.
Well, both Gay and Smith returned Friday night as special guests at the school annual football banquet. Gay and Smith, who both went on to play at the University of Louisville, received appreciation awards from Hubbard during the banquet.
"I wanted to let these guys know that we watch them and we follow them," Hubbard said. "I didn't know these guys would comeback, and I think it's so special they decided to comeback."
Not even a week after his Steelers won Super Bowl XLIII, Gay found a chair in the same cafeteria where he and Smith used to eat chicken tenders and wondered whether they'd attend track practice.
"I shot down here straight from Pittsburgh to be a part of this because this is my home," Gay said. "This is what I believe in. This is what I'm a part of - Rickards High School."
Smith expressed similar sentiments.
"I always come back here to work out in the summer and to let (current Rickards players) know that they can be where I am at the present moment," Smith said. "Like I said, this is where I started out at. This campus, this ground is what got me to where I got today. That's why I wanted to come back."
While receiving his appreciation award, Smith kept his comments on the theme of appreciation.
"I appreciate the work ethic instilled in me here," he added. "I learned to never stop working. You have to grind at all times. No one is going to give you anything. When I was at Rickards, we weren't too successful. That's why we knew we had to go out and play hard and practice hard each and every week."
In a lighter moment, during his comments, Gay took a friendly jab at Smith's Chiefs, who went 2-14 this season.
"He's on a sorry team," Gay said. "And next year it will be an honor for him to be on the same field as the Super Bowl champions."
Smith, who played in only seven games last season due to a leg injury, could only drop his head and laugh.
The presence of the two professionals had Rickards' All-Big Bend junior linebacker Fred Griggs hankering for his own return to the field next season.
"It's crazy," Griggs said. "We got a Super Bowl player and another NFL player here. And you got our whole team coming back here. It just makes me anxious to play next year."
Copyright (c)2009 Tallahassee Democrat
Press readers go with the Steelers
While the Super Bowl won't crown a champion for another several hours, the readers of The Bristol Press have made no mistake of who they think will head off to Disney World with the Vince Lombardi Trophy in hand.
After several days of voting at bradcarrollgameday.blogspot.com you have chosen your champion - the Pittsburgh Steelers.
And if the final poll results have anything to say about the game tonight, it won't even be close. The Steelers racked up 65 percent of the vote to the Cardinals 34 percent. Pittsburgh received almost double the amount of votes on their way to a wire-to-wire victory.
The upstart Cardinals, who shocked the football world by beating the Falcons, Panthers and Eagles in advancing to the Super Bowl tonight, couldn't pull in enough of the underdog vote to make a dent in the final tally.
The Steelers, who knocked off the Chargers and Ravens to advance to Tampa, were impressive enough in the playoffs that even the Cinderella Cardinals couldn't stop them in our poll.
After breaking down tonight's game, everything points to a blowout victory for the Steelers. Pittsburgh has the superior defense with the ability to shut down the Cardinals explosive offense - led by Kurt Warner, Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin. Arizona has the edge on offense, with its big play ability, but if the Pittsburgh secondary can shut down the big Arizona receivers this could turn into yet another Super Bowl blowout.
While our readers had no problem picking a champion in our poll, that doesn't mean I have the same confidence in one choice or the other.
I can realistically see the Cardinals pulling off another upset and beating the Steelers in Tampa tonight. After all, underdogs have been all the rage this year, starting with the biggest one of them all - the Giants beating the undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII.
So, in making my Super pick, I either have to go with my head (which says Steelers) or my heart (which is pulling for the Cardinals).
When all is said and done this will be your final score:
Pittsburgh 24, Arizona 20
(c) Copyright 2009 The Bristol Press
Many teams change, but the Steelers have not
Even when the rest of football changed, they didn't.
There was Air Coryell and the Run-N-Shoot. The K-Gun and the Greatest Show on Turf. Football has become about offense, about statistics and points and pretty passes that can be packaged into a two-minute highlight reel.
But the Steelers of today essentially are the Steelers of yesteryear. Three decades ago, they were a defensive force, the Steel Curtain, a team that was above all else physically superior. Today, a week before they play in their seventh Super Bowl, they're still a defensive force, above all else physically superior. At a time when continuity in sports is a trashed art, the Steelers remain the unchanged principle.
In their brutality, there is beauty. A meanness and abrasiveness that is exclusively football. Football is sports' answer to war. It's violent. It's bloody. It's severe. The way the Steelers play it, there's no answer to all of it than more violence, more blood, more severity.
But in their weekly war, there is an eternal peace.
It's a peace that reaffirms hard-working people will always have a place, that it's OK to be more spit than polish, that good things don't have to end as long as they work and keep working.
People debate the true identity of America's Team.
Well, it's a useless exercise. America's Team isn't a team at all. It's a unit. It's the Steelers defense, philosophically unchanged for the past three-and-a-half decades, predicated on the belief that even the best offenses can be intimidated, out-nastied into submission year after year, without fail.
Since their dynasty of the 1970s began to take shape in 1972, the Steelers have led the NFL in least yards allowed seven different times. Eighteen times in those 37 seasons, they finished in the top five. As far as finishing in the top 10 goes, they are 26-for-37.
Winning is no mystery.
This kind of success, it's no accident.
It's a lineage of belief in the infallibility of hard work, a testimony of toughness. It's the unwavering belief in a system.
For the most part, the Dallas Cowboys built their teams with the free-agent dollar. They've sustained their success by throwing money at players like Deion Sanders, Charles Haley and Terrell Owens.
The Steelers have had their share of stars, but they were stars formed by the Steeler Way.
Think about so many of the great defensive players in Steelers history, then remember where they came from.
Mean Joe Greene, Dwight White, Ernie Holmes and L.C. Greenwood - the front four of the vaunted Steel Curtain - came from North Texas, Texas A&M-Commerce, Texas Southern and Arkansas-Pine Bluff, respectively.
Greg Lloyd, the star sack-artist of the 1990s and one of the most feared players in all of football, came out of Fort Valley State.
Think the Steelers are lucky to find players of that caliber out of smaller schools? Or are they just better at finding those players than everybody else?
The 2008 Steelers' defense, which ranked first overall in the NFL for the second season in a row and in the Top 10 for the ninth straight season, isn't built on stars. It's built the same way the Steel Curtain was built - on players who the system turned into stars. Great players, yes. But system players, too.
This tells the whole story:
* There are only two free agent signings among the Steelers' 11 defensive starters - middle linebacker James Farrior and hard-hitting safety Ryan Clark.
* Counting Farrior, there are just three first-round draft picks among the starters - run-eliminating defensive tackle Casey Hampton and the unfairly talented safety Troy Polamalu.
Neither of them were among the top 10 picks in the Draft.
* Only one of the other eight starters was picked among the first 50 players drafted the year they came out of college.
Two players - Clark and linebacker James Harrison - weren't drafted at all.
Football has changed a lot. The Pittsburgh Steelers haven't.
They're a week away from their date with the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII, and they're seven-point favorites to win their record sixth Vince Lombardi Trophy.
It's unprecedented success.
And no accident.
The Scranton Times Tribune
Miami Dolphins sign CFL sackmaster Cameron Wake
It's another textbook move, the type of signing that has become the defining way in which vice president of football operations Bill Parcells tries to turn around teams.
Whether or not Canadian Football League sackmaster Cameron Wake will make a successful transition into the NFL remains to be seen, but the Dolphins are the team wanting anxiously to give him his shot.
Wake, 25, a two-time CFL defensive player of the year with 39 sacks over the past two seasons, signed a four-year deal that includes nearly $1 million in guarantees. The overall deal is worth nearly $3.6 million.
Make no mistake: Miami isn't treating Wake as an experimental project -- but instead as a prospect it believes will be an impact player as a pass-rushing linebacker in the NFL. Wake will now have the chance to learn under current linebacker Joey Porter.
Wake is 6-3, 240 pounds, the type of big-bodied, workout junkie that Parcells and general manager Jeff Ireland crave. He played his two seasons in the CFL with the British Columbia Lions.
The Dolphins also signed one of Wake's college teammates from Penn State on Monday. Safety Ethan Kilmer, who has played with the Bengals for the past three seasons, also agreed to a free-agent contract, the team announced.
Kilmer is viewed as a special-teams prospect. But he also did make an impact on defense for the Bengals this season when he returned an interception (thrown by Drew Brees) 52 yards for a touchdown.
Kilmer and Wake played together at Penn State on the same defense in 2004.
Copyright 2009 Miami Herald Media Co.
NFL Playoff Games to Get Wintry Swirl of Cold, Wind
Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Cold and wind will greet the defending Super Bowl champion New York Giants as they battle their National Football League conference rival Philadelphia Eagles in a playoff game this afternoon.
Temperatures will be between 26 degrees and 28 degrees Fahrenheit (-3 to -2 Celsius) and winds as high as 16 miles per hour (25 kilometers per hour) for the 1 p.m. start, said Carrie McCabe, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.com in State College, Pennsylvania.
About 1.1 inches (2.7 centimeters) of snow fell as of last night on New York City, McCabe said. New York City's suburbs and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut received between 2 inches to 3 inches from the storm, said the National Weather Service's forecast office in Upton, New York, on its Web site.
A winter storm this past week left a swath of snow across the northern U.S. from Montana to Chicago to upstate New York. Remnants of it -- frigid air and high winds -- will make temperatures at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, feel like about 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Northern New Jersey received as much as 2.9 inches of snowfall, the National Weather Service said.
New York and Philadelphia have met three times in the NFL postseason, with the Giants winning twice.
Chargers-Steelers
The Giants-Eagles clash won't be the only NFL game to be played in sub-freezing conditions as the San Diego Chargers tackle the Pittsburgh Steelers at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh beginning at 4:45 p.m. The temperature at kickoff is expected to be about 26 degrees, Pigott said.
"It's not going to be as windy in Pittsburgh, but there could be some snowflakes flying around," said Eric Wilhelm, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather. "San Diego isn't going to be used to this weather."
Areas of southern New England may get as much as 9 inches of snow by noon today, the National Weather Service said. The Catskill, Taconic and Berkshire mountains in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts could see as much as 12 inches of white powder, the agency said.
Salisbury and Townsend, both in Massachusetts, each received 6 inches or more by 6 a.m. local time this morning, while Wilton, New Hampshire had 7 inches of the white powder as of 6 a.m. local time, the National Weather Service said.
This storm will be followed by another that will move across the U.S. early this week.
That system will drag a pocket of frigid air into the Great Lakes, Upper Midwest and across the Northeast, sending temperatures plunging. AccuWeather.com meteorologist Jesse Ferrell said on his blog that temperatures in New York City may be the coldest in 14 years by week's end.
(c)2009 BLOOMBERG L.P.
Hey, now Ravens have a quarterback
It was still summer when Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis saw the future. The rest of the pro football world was wondering why Baltimore had hired a career assistant as its head coach and had traded three draft picks to select a gangly quarterback from Delaware named Joe Flacco.
Lewis noticed that Flacco, a low-key rookie with a buzz cut, did not back down from the boisterous defense during training camp.
"This," Lewis told the coaches, "is the guy."
Lewis, the sage of the Ravens for more than a decade, was right.
This week, Flacco said that even when he was working out with his father and brothers in the backyard, he expected to be quarterbacking a playoff team by now. Although many people outside the Ravens' headquarters might have disagreed with that thought, Baltimore has emerged with Flacco this season as one of the NFL's best turnaround stories.
Seven teams in the postseason field were not in the playoffs last season, and today's AFC wild-card game features two of the biggest shockers: the Ravens (11-5) and the Dolphins (11-5).
In fact, the last time anybody was paying attention to a Ravens trip to play the Dolphins was late last season, when Baltimore became the only team to lose to Miami in 2007. The Dolphins' winning touchdown on a 64-yard catch-and-run through the Ravens' vaunted defense was the final indignity for a team that was on its way to a 5-11 record after finishing 13-3 in 2006. It cost coach Brian Billick his job and led to the bold draft-day move for Flacco.
He may be the sooner-than-expected star of the team. A local radio ad proclaims: "The Ravens are back in the playoffs. And now they have a quarterback."
But Baltimore was in better position for a rebound than either Miami or Atlanta, the other playoff teams with rookie coaches.
Coach John Harbaugh, the former special-teams guru with the Eagles, inherited the Ravens' superb defense - the foundation for everything in purple and black. The biggest problem last season was a rash of injuries: Ravens starters missed a total of 77 games, with the secondary hit particularly hard.
"Honestly, I knew we had a good opportunity of making the playoffs this year," receiver Derrick Mason said.
"It's not like we did a blowout of the team and got rid of a bunch of guys. We brought in a new head coach, one offensive coordinator, and we brought in a few players. But for the most part, everyone was here from last year and everyone was healthy. I knew if everyone stayed healthy, we'd be in the same position we were two years ago."
Still, the Ravens and the Dolphins started so slowly this season that their regular-season game in October seemed inconsequential until this week. Both teams were 2-3, and the Ravens had lost three in a row, including a 31-3 humiliation to the Indianapolis Colts, who were also struggling at the time.
Almost everything seemed to be going against the Ravens. Even the schedule suggested a long slog to irrelevance when their bye week was rescheduled to the second week of the season because hurricane damage had forced the postponement of their game in Houston.
But in Miami, the Ravens summoned a vintage performance, with a pounding running game and a smothering defense that was the first to stymie the Dolphins' Wildcat offense and one of the few to intercept Chad Pennington, who ended up tossing just seven interceptions this season. Flacco had what still stands as his best passer rating: 17 of 23 for 232 yards and a touchdown.
The Ravens have since gone 8-2, including a critical come-from-behind victory at Dallas in the next-to-last week of the regular season.
"The Miami game was a turning point," offensive tackle Willie Anderson said earlier this week. "We all bought into the brotherhood of fighting. Everything was against us, no bye week.
"The world was saying we were done after that three-game losing streak after we got smashed in Indy. I think the turning point was Miami, and I think it was the turning point for them."
It's funny how things work out. A commercial for a local trucking company has been showing on Baltimore television stations this week. The star of the commercial would look familiar to those in Miami, too.
It is Cam Cameron, the offensive coordinator credited with Flacco's emergence.
A year ago, Cameron was the man in a tearful embrace with the Dolphins owner, H. Wayne Huizenga, as they celebrated the lone bright spot in a bleak season. Cameron would lose his job as Miami's coach soon after. But Harbaugh scooped him up to join his staff.
Two turnarounds began, even if one will end in more tears today.
(c) Copyright 2009 Tacoma News, Inc
Raiders beat the Bucs
TAMPA, Fla. -- Michael Bush broke two tackles, rambled through a gaping hole in the right side of the defense and headed upfield to put a dagger in Tampa Bay's slim playoff hopes.
The 245-pound third-string running back rushed for a career-high 177 yards and scored on a 67-yard fourth-quarter jaunt that helped the Raiders rally to end the Buccaneers' season with a 31-24 victory Sunday.
Even with a win, the Bucs (9-7) would have needed help to make the playoffs and avoid one of the biggest collapses in franchise history. They were 9-3 and tied for first heading into December but finished with four consecutive losses.
The Raiders (5-11) overcame a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to win for the second straight week and make their final case for interim coach Tom Cable to retain his job. They improved to 4-8 since Lane Kiffin was fired four games into the season, winding up with their most wins since going 5-11 under Norv Turner in 2004.
JaMarcus Russell threw for 148 yards and two touchdowns for the Raiders, who looked as though they were out of the game after being outgained 168-21 in the third quarter and watching Tampa Bay go up 24-14 with a field goal and touchdown in the first four minutes of the fourth period.
But Oakland's young quarterback rebounded from throwing an interception that Sabby Piscitelli returned 84 yards to the Raiders' 11 to set up Carnell "Cadillac" Williams' 8-yard TD run.
A 43-yard pass interference penalty led to Russell's 12-yard TD pass to Johnnie Lee Higgins that trimmed Oakland's deficit to 24-21, and that was just the beginning of the end for Tampa Bay.
Williams, who missed the first 10 games of the season because of a career-threatening injury to his right knee from September 2007, hurt his left knee at the end of a 28-yard gain in front of the Bucs bench.
The drive stalled on downs at the Oakland 33, and Bush took over from there. He beat would-be tacklers Kevin Carter and Jovan Haye on his 67-yard TD burst and carried repeatedly on the Raiders' next possession to burn the clock and set up Sebastian Janikowski's 25-yard field goal that made it 31-24 with 1:09 to go.
Tampa Bay's offense struggled to move the ball against a defense playing without injured Pro Bowl cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, and the defense once again failed to get consistent pressure on an opposing quarterback and had difficulty getting off the field on third down.
The Bucs gave up 564 yards rushing and allowed Carolina, Atlanta and San Diego to convert 21 of 37 third downs the previous three weeks. Oakland finished with 192 yards rushing and converted 6 of 13 first downs.
Jeff Garcia threw for 257 yards, including a 58-yarder to Michael Clayton for a third-quarter touchdown that erased Oakland's 14-7 halftime lead. Williams finished with a season-best 78 yards rushing on 12 carries.
Russell was 14-of-21 for Oakland and was intercepted once. Bush averaged 6.6 yards per carry on 27 attempts with the Raiders' other two running backs, Justin Fargas and Darren McFadden, hobbled by injuries.
Copyright (c) 2008 - San Jose Mercury News
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