They say that idle hands are the devil’s playground. We can probably tweak that to describe the downtime for an NFL team between games when they have a bye week or a Thursday game, because, boy, has there been chatter surrounding the Pittsburgh Steelers since they were last inside a stadium.
From that point of view, Sunday’s game against the Green Bay Packers cannot get here soon enough. They have been mired in a slew of largely manufactured controversies that have only fed upon themselves due to the fact that they haven’t had the opportunity to take the field and change the narrative.
Rather, we should say that the coverage of the team has been mired in it, because that hasn’t been the case internally, according to those who are, you know, actually inside. Several players addressed the issue of, for example, WR George Pickens recently, but there was also T Chukwuma Okorafor’s benching for internal disciplinary reasons, and of course there’s the old reliable Matt Canada saga, wherever it might stand at any given time. But in the locker room, nobody really cares. Nobody’s freaking out thinking Pickens is some ticking time bomb.
“It doesn’t seem like nothing in the locker room”, CB Joey Porter Jr. told Jim Rome recently about how the players have felt about Pickens’ frustrations and the ensuing media firestorm. “Everybody’s still talking, hanging out, making great conversation. I feel like it’s, Coach [Mike Tomlin] said. It’s really the outside noise that’s trying to creep in. Inside the house, it’s great”.
I want to clarify that Porter above uses the word “nothing” to mean “anything”, as in, “It doesn’t seem like anything”, because tone cannot translate through text. I don’t want his remark to be misconstrued as suggesting that it was something. Rather, it was nothing. Just so we have that very clear. And of course you can hear how he says it yourself.
“We just hit it head-on on the nose, explain what happened and just move past it”, he added when rome asked him how they handled the Pickens situation. “That’s all we can do. There’s no point of just dwelling on the past. We’ve got games to finish and games to win. That’s the last thing we’re thinking about. We’re thinking about the Packers and trying to get this W”.
Likewise, defensive captain Cameron Heyward took the same attitude when asked to talk about the tenor of the locker room amid the recent drama surrounding Pickens and Okorafor—insisting that that drama is coming from outside the house.
“Just locked in on the Packers”, he said, via the team’s website. “I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of people who have dealt with that before. I’m not gonna minimize it, but I just think the goal is still to win and all we can do is try to give ourselves the best opportunity to do that. No matter who’s out there, if you’re not out there, you’re communicating, but we can’t deter from what we’re trying to accomplish”.
Because let’s be very honest here. This conversation would have been dead by now if there weren’t such a long layover after a Thursday night game. And the Steelers played in primetime, so all the national media got a chance to see Pickens sulking on the bench after Diontae Johnson’s go-ahead touchdown. If they beat the Titans in the exact same way on Sunday at 1 PM, this conversation doesn’t happen. Not the way it has unfolded, anyway. And now, they finally get a chance once again to let their play speak for themselves.
