Picture 2: Carl Pickford of the Cleveland Steamers is tackled by Earl Vickers of the Buffalo Beasts and fumbles the ball in overtime in the 1958 Continental Football Organization Championship Game, later dubbed "The Greatest Game Ever Played"
Picture 3: A scene from the movie "Glory Days of Mumford High" with Bebe Danvers and Harley Pratt that made the Steamers' futility into a cultural meme
Picture 4: The Steamers' official cheer team, the Boiler Crew, alongside its official mascot, Boiler Bill (the costumed steam locomotive) seen here alongside head coach Kareem Salim and new signing Drake Cozens on March 4, 2022
Picture 5: The Steamers' unofficial- and unrecognized- mascot, "Poopie" at a Steamers game on November 6, 2022
Picture 6: Eleanor Feldman, the portrayer of "Poopie" alongside her costume in her home
Historical Overview
The Cleveland Steamers are the world’s oldest professional gridiron football team. Founded by the Cleveland Steam Company in 1892, the Steamers began as a promotional enterprise for the Company itself: players were given guaranteed jobs at the Steam Company in addition to their football wages. The Steamers initially recruited recently graduated college stars and formed a barnstorming team that toured the fledgling northeastern republics of Gideon and Columbia, playing a mix of city all-star teams and collegiate powerhouses. Their jerseys, then as now, featured the Company’s colours — brown as the primary colour, accented by yellow and black.
Led by the iconic coach Sidney Brown, the Steamers quickly proved to be more than a novelty. Their early success helped spur the formation of the Continental Football Organization (CFO) in 1904. In its earliest years, the CFO consisted of only a handful of teams, and the Steamers were the only club that reliably fulfilled its full schedule each season. As a result, from 1904 to 1919, the Steamers officially claimed all but two of the CFO’s recognized championships, awarded largely on the basis of what the league termed the best overall record.
Part of the Steamers’ success stemmed from another early innovation: the incorporation of the forward pass into their offensive playbook. Contrary to popular belief, the Steamers’ early offence was not built around passing. Like most teams of the era, they were primarily run-first. However, the forward pass existed as a tactical option — deployed sparingly as a “trick play,” most often when the Steamers needed to gain large chunks of yardage quickly.
The Steamers would not become a predominantly passing team until Bear Bowman assumed the head coaching role in 1938. Bowman fundamentally reimagined the offence, transforming Cleveland into one of the continent’s earliest pass-centric teams. From the outset, the Steamers’ passing attack employed route concepts and timing patterns that remain commonplace today, alongside formations and reads that would still be considered exotic by modern standards.
By 1920, the CFO had consolidated stronger leadership and a deeper competitive field, breaking the Steamers’ near-monopoly at the top of the league. Even so, Cleveland remained the CFO’s most dominant club and developed a defining rivalry with the league’s other great power, the Buffalo Beasts. The two franchises traded championship dynasties into the 1950s. The apex of the Steamers’ dominance came in 1951, when they defeated the Beasts 29–25 in their final regular-season game, sealing the CFO championship on a last-second flea-flicker pass.
The Greatest Game Ever Played
In 1954, the Continental Football Organization (CFO) divided itself into two divisions, separating Buffalo and Cleveland and creating a formal CFO Championship Game between the two division winners at the conclusion of each season. League officials believed that a dedicated championship final was both more compelling for audiences and more competitively fair than determining champions solely by regular-season record. To lend the new game prestige and neutrality, the CFO selected the Yale Bowl as its permanent host and signed a broadcast agreement with Electronic Poetry — a partnership now widely regarded as the precursor to the eventual creation of the EPSC.
The Championship Game’s early years were uneven. Because Buffalo and Cleveland now competed in separate divisions, only one of the two powerhouses typically reached the final. Once there, the Steamers and Beasts routinely overwhelmed their opponents, resulting in a series of lopsided contests. Executives at Electronic Poetry privately expressed concern about the long-term appeal of such blowouts, but the CFO resisted calls to alter the format, prioritizing competitive integrity over spectacle.
That dynamic finally shifted in 1958, when Cleveland and Buffalo met in the CFO Championship Game for the first time. The Steamers were still led by Bear Bowman, whose innovative passing schemes had frustrated CFO defences throughout the season and propelled Cleveland to a wide margin lead in scoring. Buffalo, by contrast, was anchored by a bruising defence and a punishing running game, led off the field by coach Greg Gifford and on it by Earl Vickers — widely regarded as football’s first true ball-hawking cornerback, as well as one of its most reliable open-field tacklers.
The matchup was immediately framed as a clash of philosophies, and it lived up to the billing. Buffalo’s defence and ball-control offence kept the game close even as Cleveland periodically broke loose with explosive plays. Late in the fourth quarter, the Steamers clung to a narrow 30–27 lead. A Vickers interception in Cleveland territory gave the Beasts the field position they needed to drive into range, and a last-second field goal as time expired sent the game into overtime.
Overtime football was itself a novelty. The 1958 Championship marked the first overtime game in CFO history, played under rules far harsher than those used today. CFO regulations called for sudden death, even if the team receiving the opening kickoff marched down the field and ended the game with a field goal.
The contest was spared that anticlimax, but its conclusion proved even more controversial. Cleveland won the coin toss and elected to receive. Within moments, Bowman’s passing attack carved through the Buffalo defence, reaching the Beasts’ one-yard line in barely ninety seconds of play.
On first-and-goal, Steamers running back Carl Pickford took the handoff and was met immediately behind the line of scrimmage by Vickers. The collision was violent enough to jar the ball loose. Buffalo defensive end Brent Luckman recovered the fumble and returned it the length of the field for a game-winning touchdown.
Cleveland immediately protested the result, arguing that Pickford’s knee had been down before the ball was dislodged and that possession should not have changed. The protest was rejected on the field by referee Joe Niemen and later upheld by CFO commissioner Brad Parkley, cementing the Beasts’ victory and ending what many still regard as the most dramatic and contentious championship game in league history.
The Long, Slow Decline
In the aftermath of the 1958 Championship Game loss, the Steamers collapsed. Cleveland finished 1–11 in 1959 and failed to win a single game in 1960. In the wake of the back-to-back disasters, Bear Bowman retired, closing the most innovative era in franchise history. He was replaced by Henry Heckleford, who immediately imposed a run-first offence in an effort to restore discipline and stability.
Heckleford succeeded in returning the Steamers to basic respectability, but the philosophical shift came at a cost. His approach ran directly against the strategic tide of football, as teams across the continent began embracing more aggressive passing concepts — many of them inspired, ironically, by Bowman’s earlier successes in Cleveland. While the sport evolved, the Steamers retreated.
The franchise’s descent from powerhouse to punchline was ultimately cemented by its failure to capitalize on football’s transformation from a niche regional pastime into a continent-wide commercial enterprise. The Steam Company remained structured as a regional industrial concern and treated the Steamers accordingly. Unlike their rivals, Cleveland never expanded its stadium, nor did it reinvest the growing windfall from broadcast rights back into the team.
By the time the CFO merged with the Gideon Football League in 1972 to form the World Football League (WFL), the Steamers had already fallen far behind the league’s new economic and competitive realities. From 1961 to 1977, Cleveland managed just one winning season — in 1969 — a statistical outlier that did little to disguise the franchise’s steady decline.
The "Joke"
In 1984, the coming-of-age comedy Glory Days of Mumford High was released to enormous box-office success during the summer season. The film was both a commercial hit and a critical darling, following its protagonist, Benjamin “Benny” Weaver, as he navigated teenage hormones, insecurity, and the pressure to lose his virginity. Unlike many films of its era, Mumford High rejected the conventional “quest for sex” narrative. Benny sought genuine intimacy rather than conquest, and the film famously ends with him remaining a virgin, forming a deep friendship with the female lead while only hinting at a future romance.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes occurs when Benny meets a girl at a party and the two retreat to a bedroom. No nudity appears on screen — a concession the actress portraying the girl, Bebe Danvers, insisted upon, briefly delaying production of the scene. As Benny nervously prepares himself, the girl, a Cleveland native, abruptly asks him to “poop all over me like the Cleveland Steamers poop all over their fans.” Benny recoils in horror, bolts from the room, and leaves the party entirely, declaring that “Cleveland girls are weird.”
Danvers would later be closely associated with the scene, not because of its shock value, but because of the behind-the-scenes dispute that preceded it. The scene was initially filmed with both actors nude, as Danvers was dating the film’s star, Harley Pratt, at the time. After filming, however, Danvers expressed reservations and requested changes. Rosenhaus publicly defended her insistence, arguing that the scene’s discomfort — rather than titillation — was essential to the film’s message. While critics praised the final version for its restraint and purpose, the scene nevertheless became a favorite among audiences drawn more to its shock than its subtext.
The line was written by director Paul Rosenhaus, himself a longtime Steamers fan, and reflected his frustration with the team’s prolonged mediocrity. The moment landed immediately in popular culture. Within months, “Cleveland Steamer” entered the vernacular as slang for a form of coprophilia — a reference that followed the team far beyond sports pages.
Steamers officials pushed back forcefully, and fans initially resisted as well. However, as Cleveland continued to field subpar teams, sections of the fanbase began to embrace the scatological association as a form of protest. What began as ironic chanting escalated into performative provocation. The team attempted to suppress the behavior by banning chants, ejecting fans wearing poop-themed attire, and even removing spectators dressed entirely in brown — despite brown being the Steamers’ primary official colour.
In isolated but widely publicized incidents, fans defecated in public areas of the stadium or hurled feces onto the field, prompting intervention from the World Football League. (The spectacle was later echoed when the comic character Borat staged a similar stunt during a televised visit to Cleveland in 2003.)
By 1992, facing mounting backlash and diminishing returns, the Steamers adopted a reluctant compromise. While neither the team nor the league endorsed the behavior, Cleveland formally ceased suppressing poop-themed protests so long as they were deemed “not extreme.” The result has been decades of uneasy coexistence: broadcasts in which fans appear in scatological regalia and chant innuendo-laden slogans, while commentators and officials pointedly ignore the spectacle on air and in all official materials.
"Poopie" vs. the Team's Official Cheer Squad
Since their inception, the Steamers have employed an official cheer squad known as the Boiler Crew — a gender-mixed group whose uniforms incorporate industrial motifs and make extensive reference to the steam industry. The Steamers also maintain an official mascot, Boiler Bill, a two-person act operating a costume resembling a steam-engine locomotive. Depending on the performers, Boiler Bill has alternated between graceful and awkward; in more recent years, the latter impression has predominated.
In contrast, beginning in 1993, an unaffiliated individual began appearing at Steamers games wearing a crude felt costume with arm and leg holes and oversized, beady eyes, unmistakably shaped like a stylized swirl of feces. The character remained unnamed until a local reporter referred to it as “Poopie,” a label that quickly stuck. The identity of the original Poopie remains unknown, and over the years multiple individuals — both men and women — have claimed to have been the first to portray the character.
Since 2000, Poopie has been portrayed continuously by Elanor “Ellie” Feldman (née Hughes). Feldman’s version of the costume, visibly distinct from its 1990s predecessors, was designed and constructed by Feldman herself. She maintains that the redesign was undertaken with the blessing of the original portrayer, whose identity she has consistently declined to reveal. A theatre actress by training, Feldman has long been a fixture in Cleveland’s cultural scene and is known to continental audiences through numerous supporting roles in television and film.
A lifelong Steamers fan, Feldman was a season ticket holder well before assuming the role of Poopie. She met her future husband, Timothy, at Steamers games, and he is frequently visible nearby whenever Poopie appears on broadcast. Feldman has stated that she draws on her background in theatre and dance when performing in costume. However, she has also acknowledged the costume’s limited sightlines and frequent instability, often compensating for stumbles with exaggerated, deliberately comic gestures. Because of these limitations, Feldman avoids performing in upper-deck seating areas near railings, citing concerns about balance and personal safety.
Under Feldman’s stewardship, Poopie expanded beyond a localized protest symbol into a continent-wide cultural reference point. Feldman made numerous appearances in costume on late-night and morning television programs, substantially raising Poopie’s public profile even among non-football audiences. Her version of the character helped crystallize a visual language that later informed early digital iconography. When international standards bodies moved to formalize emoji-style symbols, the “poop” glyph they adopted bore a clear resemblance to the Poopie design that had already entered popular consciousness.
As a result, Poopie carried the Steamers’ futility far beyond the boundaries of football, transforming the franchise into a recurring punchline for comedians and commentators who leaned heavily into its scatological associations. This development has proven deeply embarrassing for both the Steamers and the league, neither of which possesses a practical mechanism to suppress the phenomenon so long as Cleveland’s on-field struggles continue.
The Current Situation
The Cleveland Steamers last won a playoff game in the 1957 CFO Championship, defeating the Toronto Blues 45–7. Since that victory, the Steamers have qualified for the postseason only six times, including their appearance in the 1958 Championship Game. Cleveland’s most recent playoff berth came in 2012, a season shortened by the Byzantine Flu, a norovirus pandemic. The Steamers have not recorded a winning season since that year and have not finished above .500 over a full schedule since 1995.
Prolonged futility has produced constant organizational churn. Cleveland has cycled through head coaches, general managers, quarterbacks, and offensive philosophies with such regularity that inconsistency itself has become the franchise’s defining trait. Although World Football League salary-cap rules require teams to spend above a minimum threshold, the Steamers consistently rank near the bottom of player payrolls, reflecting the Steam Company’s preference for cost control over competitive risk.
Frustration among the fanbase has mounted accordingly. Many supporters — Poopie included — have openly called for the Steam Company to sell the franchise to an owner willing to invest aggressively in winning. The Company has refused, and the league has shown little appetite for forcing a change, preferring the stability of a compliant if unremarkable ownership group. At the same time, a smaller but vocal segment of fans resists the idea of a sale on sentimental grounds, noting that the Steam Company has been a continuous presence not only in Steamers football, but in the professional game itself.
The Steamers’ current head coach, Kareem Salim, was hired in 2020. Under Salim, Cleveland has regained a measure of on-field respectability through a stifling defensive identity and a conservative, run-first offence designed to control possession and shorten games. However, Salim’s relationship with management has been strained by repeated disputes over roster investment. Team leadership has routinely declined to pursue players Salim believes would meaningfully elevate the roster — with one notable exception.
In March 2022, the Steamers departed from their usual caution and signed veteran quarterback Drake Cozens to a five-year contract worth $175 million, with $55 million guaranteed. The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to stabilize the franchise’s long-troubled quarterback position. Instead, Cozens’ tenure has been marked by controversy, repeated clashes with Salim, and uneven on-field results. Many observers believe Cozens signed in Cleveland only because he had exhausted other options, and pundits continue to question whether the arrangement can succeed — or whether it merely represents another chapter in the Steamers’ long cycle of miscalculation.
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