Old habits die hard. Like hating a team because they beat your team. And a lot of allegiances were formed in the 1970s for the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Whichever side you came down on, chances are you hated the other team.
It couldn’t have been pleasant to be a young Cowboys fan in the 1970s watching them play the Steelers. Not in the Super Bowl. Not again. But that’s what Wally Williams dealt with as a little kid in Tennessee. And he carried that with him into the NFL as a divisional rival.
“The Pittsburgh thing is some deep-rooted stuff”, he recently said on the Opening Kickoff podcast, explaining to his hosts why as a former Cleveland Brown and Baltimore Raven he particularly hated playing in Pittsburgh. He talked about the memory of watching one of those losses. “I never rebounded from that”.
A college free agent out of Florida A&M, Williams signed with the Browns as a rookie in 1993. He followed the franchise through the move to Baltimore and the name change to the Ravens, playing there for three seasons. Each game in Pittsburgh he played with hatred in his heart.
“You turn on a team and you just hate these guys, and that was my Steeler moment”, he recalled, “where I said, ‘You know what? If I get the opportunity to play against those guys, I’m gonna rip their freakin’ heads off because I don’t like what they did to the Cowboys’”.
And yet these days it’s not uncommon for him to be seen wearing Steelers gear. You see, blood runs thicker than water. Though he was the Ravens’ first-ever franchise-tagged player and is a member of their all-time team, he sports the Black and Gold because his son, Braunson Williams, is working as a scouting intern in Pittsburgh.
“There’s some poetic justice with that”, he said with a laugh. “I’ve been [there] a couple times and I have my Pittsburgh gear. I don’t have it on right now. But I do wear my Pittsburgh gear on Sunday. But their season’s over, so I’m back to the Ravens stuff, so it’s all good”.
As you may be aware, the Steelers were eliminated in the Wild Card Round by the Buffalo Bills. The Ravens advanced to the AFC Championship game, where they will host the Kansas City Chiefs.
It is the furthest the Ravens have gotten since winning the Super Bowl in 2012; the last time the Steelers got that far was 2016, though, so it’s not as though either has much to brag about. But in case Dad comes to visit in the next couple weeks, Braunson might have some explaining to do about the purple.
The hiring of Williams as a scouting intern was part of Omar Khan’s first wave of moves as general manager in mid-2022. That also included hiring Casey Weidl, brother of assistant general manager Andy Weidl, as Scouting Coordinator. He was seen on the scouting trail at Rutgers and West Virginia and was also at the Shrine Bowl.
