The Pittsburgh Steelers dropped their 2015 regular season opener 28-21 to the New England Patriots Thursday night and according to head coach Mike Tomlin, the coaching staff had problems communicating with each other on their headsets early on in the game
“We were listening to the Patriots radio broadcast for the majority of the first half on our headsets,” Tomlin said after the game.
The head coach went on to say that that’s not the first time they have had problems communicating with each other when they play the Patriots in Foxboro.
“That’s always the case,” he said.
Tomlin went on to say that they alerted the officials on the sideline and let them handle things. It should also be noted that Tomlin never blamed the problems on the Patriots specifically.
On the heels of Deflate-gate and the surfacing of new allegations this past week in an Outside the Lines article related to Spy-gate, you can bet what happened Thursday night with the Steelers coaches’ inability to communicate with each other will be talked about quite a bit through the rest of the weekend.
When one team loses communications, the other team’s headsets are supposed to be turned off as well in order to equal things out. The league is reportedly in charge of communications in stadiums. According to Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Michael Signora, who works for the league, blamed the Steelers communication failures on “stadium power infrastructure issue, which was exacerbated by the inclement weather.”
The Patriots also reportedly had issues Thursday night.
“We had a lot of problems,” Bill Belichick said. “We had to switch headphones a couple of times. The communication system wasn’t very good. We deal with that, it seems, weekly.”
Tomlin was clearly not happy with what happened Thursday night and you can’t rightly blame if indeed his claims are true about them always having problems in Foxboro. It’s not the reason they lost the game, however, and I’m sure several will take Tomlin’s comments as him trying to make excuses for how his team played against the Patriots.
