A man who does not like crowds is surrounded by them in a sense almost every hour of the day. That irony is not lost on Steelers Depot founder Dave Bryan.
“It is funny,” Bryan said. “Social media gives you a chance to interact without personally interacting. It’s almost like a fantasy world.”
Dream world is more like it.
Bryan has parlayed his love of the Steelers, technological savvy and manic personality into a website that has taken off since he launched it in 2007.
Steelers Depot, which provides non-stop updates, analysis and in-depth breakdowns, has become so popular that Bryan hired a full-time writer in 2015 and also has several part-time scribes on his payroll.
Bryan declined to go into specifics on how his site became profitable enough to turn into a second career for him. The Pensacola, Florida, resident did say that Steelers Depot receives more than 2 million hits per month, a staggering number for a grass-roots website.
“It really has snowballed over the last three or four years,” Bryan said.
A lot of that is because of Bryan himself.
He taught himself how to design and launch websites after retiring at the age of 40 following a successful real estate career. And Bryan has been in front of the curve when it comes to always-evolving social media.
He started blogging tirelessly before it became popular and has built a vast following in part because he never seems to stop.
Bryan is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict and he said a number of disorders flared up after he got clean. One of those is bipolar disorder, which Bryan said does not allow him to sleep more than five hours on the one day of the week he gets a significant amount of winks.
As a result, Bryan said, he spends 18–20 hours a day watching Pittsburgh sports and writing about the Steelers on his website and other social media outlets such as Twitter. The work is perfect for Bryan because he has an aversion to crowds and has only been to two Steelers games in his life.
Steelers Depot, a popular website for team news and analysis, caters to fans such as Bud Yoder of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
He has tapped into something though, as Steelers Depot has more Twitter followers (49,100 as of May 2016) than every Steelers beat writer after the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Ed Bouchette, who is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Steelers Depot’s rise is as unique as Bryan’s fierce allegiance to the Steelers and Pittsburgh sports in general.
Bryan was born in Pensacola and the only time he visited Pittsburgh he and his wife went to a Pirates baseball game. But his love of the Steelers started when he was just a youngster and Bryan wanted to tweak his dad, who rooted for the Cowboys,
Before long, he was a “full-fledged Yinzer” and that eventually led to a full-time gig doing something Bryan loves.
It helps that his writers are as passionate about the Steelers as Bryan is—the group makes 16 to 20 posts a day and does not recognize that there is an off-season—not to mention an understanding wife.
“Is she a sports fan? Absolutely not,” said Bryan. “She could tell you the key players on the [Steelers] but she doesn’t keep up with the record or sit with me and watch games. She knows it’s just part of who I am.”
Two of a Kind
Tunch Ilkin and Craig Wolfley are so inseparable that they still share everything from a cramped dorm room at training camp to a Twitter account. That doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally need a break from one another, as they found out during the most trying stretch of their Steelers playing careers. The team went 5–11 in 1988 and lost 10 of 11 games at one point. Tension that season boiled over between the best friends as they were walking to their gate in Pittsburgh International Airport for an away game.
Wolf told Tunch he looked like a preppie and the latter took offense. “What are you talking about?” Tunch fired back. “You look like yesterday’s newspaper.” The two started arguing and nearly came to blows in the airport. They went their separate ways but within 15 minutes found one another and started laughing. Even funnier is what they heard a woman say to her husband during their spat. “Look at them,” she said. “No wonder they’re losing. They’re fighting amongst themselves.”