Sometimes it’s hard to tell when Mike Tomlin doesn’t know or understand something or when he’s pretending not to know or understand something. My sense is that neither of them are infrequent, but that the latter is far more prominent than many may realize.
I’m rather convinced that his response when asked about Pittsburgh Steelers S Minkah Fitzpatrick’s comments falls under the latter category. He knew exactly what his All-Pro defensive back was trying to say, and maybe even why he was saying it. But he couldn’t put that out there as the head coach of the team.
“I think too many people don’t want to toil for it; they just want to walk out here and think that they’re gonna make plays”, Fitzpatrick said from his locker following the Steelers’ loss to the New England Patriots. “I think that dudes just think that just because they’re wearing the Black and Gold that they’re gonna win games, and I think that we need to check that mentality and make people realize that they gotta earn that mentality”.
That’s quite an indictment from a prominent player about his teammates, asserting that there is an entitlement mentality hindering their ability to win games. It’s like the bystander effect: you think someone else is going to do what needs to be done in order to achieve the desired result. Only nobody calls the ambulance, and nobody makes the play, because they don’t do what’s needed.
That’s the theory, anyway, but you wouldn’t know it listening to Tomlin’s theory about what Fitzpatrick meant. Here are his comments, in full, when asked about it:
He probably was talking about smiling in the face of adversity. There are gonna be tough games. There’s gonna be some adversity. There’s gonna be some challenges. Nothing is gonna be given to us, and we’ve got to fight that. We’ve got to smile in the face of that. He’s a guy that does that and lives that life, and I’m sure he’s just challenging others to do the same. We’ve got to do a better job of that to change the outcome of games, certainly.
I’m sorry, Mike, but he wasn’t paraphrasing a Tomlinism here. He wasn’t talking about cheerfully toiling through the grind. He was saying that people are not putting in the required work because they feel like they don’t or shouldn’t have to.
I mean, I suppose it’s in the ballpark but it’s coming at the wrong part of the timeline. Fitzpatrick’s not talking about entitlement, he’s talking about a certain type of work ethic. This is not about meeting adversity head-on. It’s about facing the adversity that you create yourself due to your lack of effort and preparation.
And at least according to Fitzpatrick, he’s not observing everybody doing that. Or he was speaking out of frustration. Either way, it wasn’t a good look for Tomlin’s team, and his clean-up efforts are wholly unconvincing, even if entirely understandable. That’s probably what he should have said.
