Sometimes, the old man finds his cloud, and he just goes to town. Lately, it seems, Pittsburgh Steelers alumni are the old men who’ve found their clouds as they seek to explain why their former team no longer lives up to the standards they once upheld.
That includes Chris Hoke, the former Steelers defensive lineman who is now in the media. He appeared on 93.7 The Fan recently with Ron Cook and Joe Starkey to talk about the current state of the team. Even though he ended up predicting they would beat the Indianapolis Colts, he went to many different places to find fault.
“I don’t know how often we had a veteran day off”, he recalled. “I mean, guys like Aaron Smith never took a day off. Casey Hampton never took a day off. A lot of these guys never took a day off. They worked every single day. And we hit!”
“When you start to give guys these days off because they’ve been in the league 10 years or eight years, it kind of promotes this kind of soft [culture]”, he went on. “If you want to be physical, if you want to be disciplined on the field on Sundays, on Saturdays, on Thursday nights, you’ve got to do it in practice”.
Hoke is intelligent enough to understand that the game has changed since he last played. Specifically, the Collective Bargaining Agreement has changed, multiple times, which significantly limits the amount of physicality with which teams can carry out their in-season practices.
You only get so much time on the field, and only so many opportunities to wear pads. Those are things that the Players Union fought for, but many younger coaches have also adopted a less physically intense regimen to prepare their teams, and with success.
The truth is that the Steelers still have among the most physical offseasons in the league, carrying out live tackling sessions in training camp, for example. But that doesn’t preclude them from lacking physicality or struggling with their tackling when it matters the most.
And as head coach Mike Tomlin would be the first to say, sometimes it’s less about who’s practicing than it is about who isn’t. He likes to judiciously utilize veteran days for players who don’t need that practice time in order to provide additional or higher-quality practice reps that a less experienced player otherwise would not receive.
That’s another byproduct of the changes to practice that have been dictated by the evolution of the CBA’s governance. There are fewer opportunities to ween young players on the practice field, so you have to create them. Perhaps this aspect of the equation slipped Hoke’s mind.
With that being said, Tomlin himself cited a lack of physical practices earlier this year as a shortcoming in their game and made sure that they practiced in pads after the loss to the Houston Texans. I don’t know how much of a difference it really made, but I’m sure the old guard approved of the decision—even if it meant more veteran days off for some of the older players who were banged up.
