Might be a coincidence, or a stretch of a reference here, but...

In forge, for the ball spawn and return pieces, the default game mode labels are entitled "Sportsball", like Sportsball:include, Sportsball:exclude, etc. Turns out, Sportsball is also the name of the weekly sports show on Rooster Teeth. Being that Burnie Burns, a founder of Rooster Teeth created Grifball (or Sarge from RvB, take your pick) and Grifball was a major part of the Hammer Storm update...I have to wonder if this was either a coincidence or 343 making a bit of a RT shout out. It's at least curious to me.