The level of turmoil in the Steelers’ locker room didn’t quite hit 2023 levels when everybody was talking about the Steelers Way being dead and gone, but it got pretty close in 2024. A five-game losing streak to end the season with another first-round exit in the Wild Card round will do that.
During that losing streak, the defense started to publicly bicker, reaching a boiling point following the Christmas Day loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. S DeShon Elliott said guys weren’t doing their job. Patrick Queen said nobody was doing anything about it and that the communication issues were stemming from a lack of faith. Cam Heyward said that if 10 guys do their job and one doesn’t then the defense is “screwed.” He later clarified that was a general statement of everybody needing to be assignment-sound, but it’s clear that the defense was having a bad time.
Mike Tomlin, along with most of the players who spoke up, later said they were just bickering because they care.
Ravens CB Marlon Humphrey weighed in on the Steelers’ issues via his podcast, hinting at some friction behind the scenes.
“The team, to me, if you look just based off of what I very teeny bit know and based off what I feel like I’ve seen/how it is, I feel like there’s an underlying thing there somewhere internally that reminds me kind of the Jets’ current situation,” Humphrey said via his Punch Line Podcast on YouTube. “Sometimes when I see quotes from Jets players, it seems like they’re trying to speak in code and there’s something that they wanna say that they can’t just say. There’s a couple times I read Jets quotes from certain players and it’s like, no one just wants to dog somebody or you really can’t tell the media exactly what’s going on. But it seems like how they kind of played in that game against us, it’s like…
“And I know something that I ain’t gonna say.”
Based on what he said, it seems likely that he is hearing things from one of his former teammates. Obviously that source is most likely to be either Queen or Elliott, both of whom were previous teammates of Humphrey in Baltimore.
Elliott was notably on Humphrey’s podcast prior to the first Steelers-Ravens game a couple months ago, and the two have remained close since Elliott departed the Ravens via free agency in 2022. To be fair, both former Ravens were outspoken about their frustration during the losing streak.
Humphrey largely beat around the bush and used the Jets as an example to loosely draw a connection back to the Steelers’ situation. He was very careful about what he said in general. Talking about what he possibly meant or who the message came from would just be speculation, but something is clearly amiss behind the scenes in the Steelers’ locker room. At least from the perspective of his source.
