For all the success he had on the field, Troy Polamalu has always been known as a calm, soft-spoken guy off the field. So when he got mad, his teammates followed suit. On Bryant McFadden and Patrick Peterson’s All Things Covered podcast, McFadden told a story about a 2005 game against the then-San Diego Chargers when wide receiver Keenan McCardell threw a cheap shot at Troy and how it fired the team up.
“When Keenan McCardell hit Troy blatantly in the back, it went from Troy being just Troy to Troy being, I got blood in my eyes and now I’m looking at you. I heard Troy, ‘14 and done,’ because it was Keenan McCardell’s 14th season,” McFadden said.
After Troy got fired up, it went from “0-60,” and Polamalu buried an opposing player, with McFadden saying Polamalu “put that Ridell in their chin” after James Harrison’s interception on the very next play, which can be found here, with unfortunately no sign of Polamalu laying the hit.
“Somebody pissed Troy off,” McFadden said, “we all pissed off for no reason.”
McFadden said the incident with McCardell was the first time he ever heard Troy curse.
Polamalu expanded on the attitude those 2000s Steelers teams had when they felt as if they had been disrespected by an opponent.
“One thing that I always admired about our team is there is definitely a level of respect and integrity we have to have on the field, but we’re still human beings,” Polamalu said. “The lines don’t end outside the out-of-bounds. One thing that I admired, there’s been several of our teammates you’ve had to pull off buses. Opposing team’s buses. Because that’s the level of brotherhood. If you mess with us, we’re going to take this to the streets.”
As Polamalu said later in the podcast, in football “you’re on the verge of a street fight.” But you have to toe the line from being violent in the way football’s designed to be played and taking cheap shots. Polamalu obviously believed the McCardell incident was a cheap shot. Although in typical Polamalu fashion, he said he apologized a few plays later, but the general idea of guys crossing that line is what Polamalu didn’t and doesn’t like.
Players need to have integrity and respect for their opponents because as Polamalu said, they’re all still human beings. Pittsburgh’s crossed that line a few times on the field, and so have its opponents. That’s how you end up with incidents where you have to pull guys off opposing buses, or in another story Polamalu told, you end up with guys confronting one another at a casino.
And sometimes, that’s football. If the Steelers felt disrespected or that someone took a cheap shot at them or their teammate, then they should be going out and making it known on and off the field that whatever happened wasn’t ok. It’s a brotherhood, and that brotherhood and camaraderie is what can make good teams great. If guys want to fight on and off the field for one another, then the coach and the team leaders have done their job. That was clearly the case with the Steelers during Polamalu’s tenure with the team, and a big reason why the team won two Super Bowls in the mid-2000s.
The current Steelers need to develop that sense of brotherhood as they grow. The defense seems to be getting there, but the offense is still young, and as those players grow together, having that level of camaraderie and standing up for one another is important. A clear sign it was there last year was James Daniels defending Kenny Pickett after a late hit against the Bills. That’s the stuff you love to see from teammates defending each other, and it’s the type of stuff that makes teams better.
