If you listen to the national media insiders, they would’ve led you to believe that Mike Tomlin still hadn’t informed the team of the starting quarterback decision as of Friday morning. If that sounded ridiculous to anybody else, you weren’t alone. It made no sense to take gamesmanship that far, wasting more of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ own time than it would have the New York Jets in their preparation. According to Bob Labriola on Asked and Answered on the Steelers’ website, Tomlin told the team on Wednesday.
“My opinion doesn’t matter, and neither does yours. And the players and coaches all knew the plan for the quarterbacks because Coach Mike Tomlin told them on the Wednesday before the game against the Jets,” Labriola wrote. “All the ‘heads’ that mattered were aware of the plan all along. The only people who didn’t know were the ‘heads’ who didn’t matter.”
ESPN’s Dan Graziano even reported on Friday morning that Tomlin had instructed the offensive staff to prepare two different game plans with the decision to be made late in the week. That obviously turned some heads. Were they really that indecisive and wasting that much of their own prep time? According to Labriola, of course, that wasn’t the case.
There is a reason that Justin Fields sounded somewhat defeated on Thursday and why Wilson was receiving all the first-team reps on Wednesday during the first practice of the week. Tomlin kept the decision out of the media for whatever reason. Call it gamesmanship, or maybe it was just to spite the local media, who have been incessantly asking him about the starting QB job in every media appearance since March.
If it wasn’t clear by the end of the week, George Pickens outright said that he has been getting additional work with Wilson all week “because this is his first start.”
So the organization did a good job at managing the local and national media, but maybe not so much their own players with this decision. The first national reporter to have the official word was Ian Rapoport on Saturday morning. Wilson will start, and that has been the plan all along.
