Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster has received a lot of flak for 2020 pregame TikTok dances. While those ultimately were put to a stop at the suggestion of head coach Mike Tomlin, he told Michael Irvin during a recent interview on his podcast that his teammates had no issues whatsoever with him doing them.
“They were all supportive of it,” Smith-Schuster told Irvin, of his teammates approving of his 2020 pregame TikTok dance ritual. “Vinny (Vince Williams), Cam Heyward, they all said, ‘Keep dancing, that’s you bro. Don’t change for nobody.’ I would understand if I was dancing, dropping balls and dropping touchdowns and messing up my assignment, that would be a different story. But I’m dancing, having fun, doing my job, making my blocks, catching balls, scoring touchdowns, and living my best life. It’s a team thing, but I don’t want to be the head of attention in a bad way, so I had to do what was right.”
Smith-Schuster said the media is more to blame than anyone for making his pregame TikTok dances a bigger deal than what it really was.
“Media, they try to find headlines and that’s how they make their money,” Smith-Schuster said. “But at the end of the day, I told coach (Mike) Tomlin I didn’t want to be a distraction to the team. At the end of the day, I got myself on an NFL Super Bowl commercial and making as much money as I can. It’s just about how people want to look at it. The media wants to portray it one way, but my teammates know how I am and that I do right by the coaches and the team.”
Regardless of who approved and didn’t approve of Smith-Schuster’s pregame logo TikTok dances, they are in the past now. Smith-Schuster doing them was not the reason for the Steelers 2020 season going south after they started 11-0. Smith-Schuster said as much when he was on boxer Ryan Garcia’s “Fierce Talk” podcast in early March.
“When I was dancing on logos and like doing TikTok dances bro everybody was like, ‘Yo, that’s the reason why you’re losing.’ No, we’re not losing because of that, we’re losing because we’re ass,” Smith-Schuster told Garcia. “Like, we literally went 11-0, and before I was doing Tik Tok dances on the Dallas Cowboys’ logo going in doing it the whole time, doing the Corvette, Corvette [dance] and now everybody wants to blame me because we’re losing. And me just doing that, people were like, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re the reason why we are losing.’ Nah, we’re losing because we just suck. We lost some key players on both sides of the ball but at the end of the day we just got outcoached, outplayed and that’s just facts. I’m just speaking facts.
“And the whole social media thing, bro. I’m going to post; I’m going to show my personality. Like that’s what you’re going to get, whether you like it or not.”
Smith-Schuster, who re-signed with the Steelers a few weeks ago, did so for just $8 million. The four voidable years of his new contract void five days after the upcoming season’s Super Bowl. He remains very active on social media, and that’s likely to continue, even though the midfield pregame logo dances aren’t likely to.
