Speaking at what used to be known as Heinz Field, Greg Williams didn’t seem like he deserved to be the most hated man in Pittsburgh. The truth is, that’s because he probably isn’t. I’m not sure if anyone in Pittsburgh really dislikes Williams. Or could recognize him on the street. Or even knows his name. They just hate his company’s name — Acrisure. Acrisure Stadium is the name that will replace Heinz Field on the marquee of the building where the Steelers and Pitt Panthers play their home games. That decision has been about as popular as a city ordinance outlawing the practice of putting fries and coleslaw on your sandwich. The Steelers’ sale of naming rights to a previously unknown (let me check my notes) "financial technology and insurance company” headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich., seems decidedly un-Pittsburgh n’at. Even if you forget that the company isn’t from Pittsburgh, the name "Acrisure” doesn’t exactly scream "football,” does it? If a reboot of the movie "Office Space” is filmed in the year 2022, I could easily see it being set in a branch office of Acrisure. To borrow a favorite phrase of Mike Tomlin’s, Acrisure strikes me as the very definition of being a "nameless, gray face” within the American corporate landscape. • Heinz Field no more: Steelers, Acrisure finalize deal for stadium naming rights • Many Steelers fans underwhelmed by Heinz Field name change • Editorial: Acrisure Stadium, you say? To Steelers fans, it'll always be Heinz Field • Never heard of Acrisure? Naming rights deal with Steelers stadium aims to change that • Ben Roethlisberger sounds off on the Heinz Field name change Based on responses I’ve seen on Twitter and in my email from readers, the vast majority of Pittsburghers loathe the stadium’s name change. They see it as Steelers owner Art Rooney II selling out. They view this decision as spitting in the face of tradition, making the team less local and catering to corporate greed. There was no way Williams was going to walk away "winning the press conference” to announce the name change Tuesday. The only thing he could’ve done was make things worse. When the team began the press conference by showing those in attendance the equivalent of a corporate hype video about the vision of the naming rights purchase, I thought that might happen. But Williams doesn’t appear to be an awful guy. A bit of a corporate muckety muck. But, hey, you don’t get to be the head of the (let me check my notes again) "eighth-largest insurance broker in the world” without having a little of that in your DNA. Williams claimed to be a lifelong Steelers fan and shared some stories about making long trips out to California from Michigan when he was younger just to get tickets because they were too hard to get in Pittsburgh. He told a tale about getting down in a hotel lobby in Cincinnati with a bus full of party-mad Steelers fans. At times, Williams almost — almost — came off as, what’s the word I’m looking for … "human”? Not what I expected from the owner of a company (sorry, just one more time, I promise) that "provides AI-driven solutions for asset management, cyber services, insurance, and real estate services clients.” Let me put it to you this way. I didn’t get the vibe from Williams that he would leave a trail of white-collar, corporate-raider ooze as he walked away from the microphone like Jim Balsillie did when he was planning to buy the Penguins for about 15 minutes back in 2006. "You get a Blackberry! That guy gets a Blackberry! Everybody gets a Blackberry! Hey, have you ever been to Hamilton, Ontario?” Do I like the name change? No. I hate it. For all the reasons you do. Not local. Unfamiliar. Antiseptic. Unidentifiable. It does feel like a sell-out. But amidst our ginned-up, Yinzplosion of outrage over the name change, we need to be honest for a moment. Consider this, what has been the most memorable physical aspect of Heinz Field over its 21-year existence? The giant red ketchup bottles, right? That’s all anyone seems to care about this week. What is going to happen to the giant red ketchup bottles? Are the Steelers ever going to score another touchdown in the red zone without the help of those mammoth bottles pouring a sea of fake red ketchup into the Jumbotron? In the history of cheesy, sell-out corporate marketing strategies, has there ever been anything more on the nose than gigantic Heinz ketchup bottles to sponsor the "red zone” at an NFL game? Yet, we lapped it up. For two decades. We had a big ol’ subliminal-sponsorship earworm going right into our brains every time the Steelers got inside the 20-yard line. And we didn’t care. Or we pretended not to notice until now. Oh, by the way, we do know that Heinz downsized in Pittsburgh years ago, merged with Kraft, and culled 350 jobs out of Pittsburgh back in 2013, right? The ketchup isn’t even made here anymore. They are going to make $150 million over 15 years as opposed to $57 million over 20 years. That’s good for the Steelers, and that’s good for stadium renovations. We’ll just need to remind Rooney II of that if they ever ask for public support for a major addition or a new stadium someday. Of the 32 NFL teams, nearly all have some sort of corporate sponsorship attached to their stadium’s name. The ones that don’t are Soldier Field in Chicago, Lambeau Field in Green Bay and Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati. Heinz was a corporate sponsorship, too. Many of us just didn’t realize it because the name is so locally rooted that we don’t consider it a corporation. That was nice. It was cozy. It was also cheap. I mean, $2.8 million per year for pro (and college) football naming rights is chump change. Ten million dollars a year is more substantial. And before you give me the "Well, Art Sr. and Dan Rooney never woulda sold out to a company from Michigan” trope, please. Yeah. They would’ve. They absolutely would have. They were businessmen just like Art II is. And, unfortunately, that’s how business is done these days. Maybe it wasn’t in the 1930s when The Chief was in charge. But it is now. The Steelers either need to keep up or fall behind. They are keeping up. In 2003, if Dan Rooney had decided to run the Steelers as his dad did in 1933, the Steelers would be the NFL equivalent of the Pirates. No one in Pittsburgh wants that. The Acrisure deal is a better one for the Steelers. And any Rooney, in any era, is going to make the smartest deal possible for the franchise. The one thing that does sit uneasily with me is if there was a Pittsburgh-based company that would have offered, hypothetically, $140 million over 15 years instead of $150 million. Would that have been good enough to at least keep it local? I asked Rooney II about that Tuesday. "That’s a little more ‘inside baseball’ than I’m going to get into,” Rooney said with a grin, acknowledging the ironically mixed metaphor. "All I’ll say is we understood what we thought the market value should be, compared to other stadiums around the country. That’s what we were shooting for.” So maybe there was such a company in the mix. It’s been said that Kraft-Heinz wanted to keep the naming rights, but they were outbid. By how much? We don’t know. But here’s a crazy thought. Stay with me on this one. What if Acrisure actually gets invested in Pittsburgh and brings in new and different jobs because of its presence here via the stadium deal? "The financial and tech sector (in Pittsburgh) is obviously an appeal,” Williams said. "As a tech company, and what Pittsburgh represents as far as tech talent, is a strategic part of what we are looking at and why we are here.” Yeah, but those ketchup bottles, though, I’m really going to miss ‘em. Look, the Steelers have been selling out for years. Like Heinz did as a company. Like every NFL team does. When you sell naming rights, you are literally "selling ‘aht”! The Steelers are just doing a better job of it now. Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via Twitter. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise. and help us continue covering the stories that matter to you and your community.