Pittsburgh Steelers RB Najee Harris had some interesting comments following the team’s postseason loss, more in a season full of “interesting” comments from him. Billed as one of the team’s offensive leaders, he has tried to lead as best as he knows how, but in his eyes, he still sees things falling short of where they should be.
“If you want to elevate where we’re at, there’s some in-house things that need to change”, he said. “If we want to elevate and achieve those goals that we want, we gotta change some in-house stuff. But like I said, that’s not my place. That’s not anything I can control”.
He was talking about matters of discipline and how things are run and specified that he wasn’t talking about making coaching or personnel changes. Nevertheless, it should be no surprise that his teammates were asked about what he said—and answered rather begrudgingly.
“That is a question for Najee”, was DL Cameron Heyward’s response, via the team’s website. “I’ve been around this team a lot. He’s come across things that were done a different way. I don’t know what’s all done on the offensive side of the ball, but more rules don’t get it done. Playing better gets it done. Being accountable? Yes. But making big plays, and making big plays in big moments, that’s what needs to be done”.
Heyward was asked if Harris’ comment about wanting to see “more rules around discipline and structure”, as the reporter framed it, was something he thought “could help this team elevate to end the playoff drought, to get to the Super Bowl things like that”. I just wanted to make sure the context was also out there and the framing in which he responded to Harris’ comments.
The younger running back was coached by the recently retired Nick Saban at Alabama. He has frequently been asked to compare and contrast the coaching styles of Saban and Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin and he’s never avoided the question. He consistently praises both but maintains their styles are different—to nobody’s great shock, surely.
None of us are in the locker room, so we don’t know what kind of discipline, what kind of rules are present behind the scenes, what the culture is like. People will picture it however they want to picture it. Those who want Tomlin fired will imagine it as a free-for-all, a frat party in which football practices occasionally break out. The truth is none of us know.
That being said, RB Jaylen Warren did acknowledge that the Steelers “maybe just a little” could use more rules. OLB T.J. Watt, when asked about in-house rules he’d like to see changed, responded, “Nothing I’d like to talk about publicly. I think some things are handled in-house for a reason”.
There is always room for improvement, and everyone is going to have his own opinion about how things could be done better. Some of them will be right. A lot of them will be wrong. In most cases, it’s six of one, half-dozen of the other. But at least the players stand a chance of knowing what they’re talking about. None of the rest of us do.
