Does “football justice” exist, as Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin believes? It is the concept that he evoked on Tuesday when describing why he is confident that second-year QB Kenny Pickett will bounce back from Sunday’s terrible performance and play the way they know he can. Pickett was asked about that yesterday.
“I believe you gotta go get it. No one’s gonna hand it to you”, he said, via the team’s website. “It’s not gonna be easy. I don’t think you just roll out there and hope it happens. You’ve got to put the work in to make it happen and go execute and play. That’s all I want to do, have fun, go out there, cut loose, see what happens”.
So if there is a sense of football justice, it is from the perspective of good things happening to those who earn it. Pickett knows that there is no magic behind it, no “secret sauce”, as Tomlin might say, to explain why players who put in the effort tend to get the results and see the fruits of their labors. And to be clear, that is Tomlin’s concept of football justice as well.
“There’s football justice when you work at it”, he said on Tuesday during his pre-game press conference. “You generally get good things that come out of it. This is a guy that’s fully committed. This is a guy that works his tail off, and largely, man, those guys create their own fortune”.
In other words, all he was doing was praising Pickett’s work ethic and his dedication to continually getting better. Football justice is the byproduct of the full commitment to excellence, and Tomlin believes that his quarterback has that.
“It’s reasonable to expect guys that work the way he works and prepares the way he prepares to bounce back from a negative performance”, Tomlin added of his struggling young quarterback. He had a bad game. Tomlin has seen plenty of bad games from Ben Roethlisberger as well, over the full range of his career.
Still, achieving even this kind of football justice will be no small task against a very good Cleveland Browns defense. The organization really bolstered its forces this offseason, adding DT Dalvin Tomlinson and DE Za’Darius Smith in the trenches, among others.
This is a team that made the Cincinnati Bengals offense look as bad as the Steelers did on Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers. Yet nobody seems to be worried about QB Joe Burrow not being able to bounce back.
Granted, Burrow has a far more established body of work than Pickett, but the overarching point is simple: it’s just one game and is not causatively predictive of the future. Those who were already convinced that Pickett doesn’t have “it” have been feasting for the past few days, but the jury is still out over how much justice his football will serve in the future.
