Here’s a little bit of a peek behind the scenes about how the clickbait sausage is made. Local loud man makes ridiculous suggestion to national loud man. National loud man writes an article talking about the ridiculous suggestion in non-ridiculous terms. And now we write about the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
And the thing is, many of you would love for this to happen, too. But no matter how much you would want it to happen, you know it’s not going to. So here we go.
Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk appeared on 93.7 FM recently with Andrew Fillipponi and Chris Mueller. They discussed the status of Head Coach Mike Tomlin and offensive line coach Mike Munchak, who is a finalist for the Denver Broncos’ head coaching job, among other things.
And then Fillipponi comes out with it. “If I were running the Steelers, I would promote Munchak and trade Tomlin”, he said.
If you actually believe this is within the realm of possibility in 2019, please leave now. If this ends up happening, in turn, I will quit the site, just because it’s that unrealistic. Not because I believe it would be a horrible idea, but simply because it’s not something the Steelers would do.
“My thing is, this is usually the time Tomlin, with two years left on his deal, gets an extension. How do you, in good faith, do that? And so if you didn’t, it might make him feel like he’s on thin ice, and he might feel like it’s in his best interest to get a fresh start somewhere”, Fillipponi went on.
The organization has allowed Tomlin’s contract to run down to one year remaining in the past. It didn’t make him a lame duck.
He added that his thought process was influenced by the rumors that teams wanted to make inquiries to the Baltimore Ravens about possibly trading for John Harbaugh, who has one year left on his contract and is now reportedly in talks for an extension.
“If the Ravens can trade John Harbaugh, why can’t the Steelers trade Tomlin?”, he asked. They could. They just wouldn’t do that.
As you might guess, Florio was eager to entertain all of this, and even acknowledged during the broadcast that he would be writing an article about it. That article ran last night, in which he called it “an intriguing idea” and “one that should at least prompt interested teams to ask themselves whether it’s worth making a call”.
It’s fun to play make believe, but we all know this would never happen. It’s also not surprising at all what the original source of the idea was and who subsequently ran with it. This is peak clickbait right here, folks. And yes, I’m a part of it, as are you for reading this.
