The Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2013 London trip turned into a sleepwalk. After flying out Thursday night and arriving Friday morning, they dragged through meetings and into a 34-27 loss to the Minnesota Vikings. Mike Tomlin may have learned from that mistake, but according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Gerry Dulac, the NFL didn’t allow Pittsburgh to adjust its travel plans this time.
“FYI, the Steelers wanted to go over early in the week, but the NFL said no and making each [team] arrive at the same time,” Dulac wrote in his weekly Steelers chat. “I don’t know the exact reason for the change…Maybe it has to do with something about a competitive advantage. But it wasn’t the Steelers’ decision.”
As the only Steelers player around for both 2013 and 2025, Cam Heyward has spoken at length about how bad that trip was for the team. The Vikings went to London earlier in the week and gave themselves time to adjust to jet lag. The Steelers did not, and it resulted in a sleep-deprived team with no energy left to play a 60-minute game of football.
Heyward said he had never seen coaches sleep in meetings before. That’s how bad it was.
Tomlin and Art Rooney II were rightfully scrutinized when they announced the same travel schedule this year, as if they hadn’t learned from their past mistake at all. It turns out that was undue scrutiny as they had no choice in the first place.
The team was left in the dark on the Steelers’ travel plans up until Sunday evening after the Week 3 game was complete, according to SI.com’s Albert Breer. So at least the Steelers are trying to implement some changes from their 2013 loss in an effort to achieve a different outcome this time around.
Should the NFL be meddling in team decisions like when to travel? They don’t for teams traveling across the country, which is just as long of a flight as the east coast to the UK. On the other hand, the NFL is starting to put games in places like Australia. At some point the league has to standardize and eliminate any possible competitive imbalance if it wants to put a good product on the field for international fans.
