Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin held his weekly press conference on Tuesday. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I couldn’t get around to mocking him by taking his words out of context until today. I hope you forgive my tardiness.
Coming off a victory over the inept Buffalo Bills, this week’s presser was a much more jovial affair than last week’s contentious effort in the wake of the Patriots debacle. At one point, Coach T even cracked the room up with his own unique brand of unemployment humor! So as always, watch actual footage of the press conference here and return here as I attempt to decipher the undecipherable.
Obviously, we did what was required in terms of winning the game
Requirements For The Steelers To Win: Play at home against a mistake-prone rookie quarterback coming off an injury and making his first start in a month.
This week’s Obviously Count: 19
We gained an extra possession, if you will, when we got a new set of downs on the field goal
That was indeed a key sequence of events.
Did Future Hall of Famer Le’Veon Bell make a hard-nosed run? Did Ben Roethlisberger escape from pressure and perform more of his sandlot-style magic? Did Antonio Brown come up with a fantastic toe-dragging sideline catch?
Tell us what ingenious play Todd Haley devised to convert that first down.
They were off-sides
Oh.
I thought our guys did a nice job sittin’ in and not movin’ and gettin’ a new set of downs
Evidently our ground-breaking new strategy for short yardage conversions is, “Stand completely still and hope the other team f*cks up.”
To be fair, our offensive lineman have been practicing that first part all season.
Speaking of our O-line, what about injuries coming out of the game, Coach T?
Some guys who were nursing bumps and bruises
Such as?
Mike Adams with his ribs
The ones that got STABBED?
Kelvin Beachum with his left hip flexor
Okay.
David DeCastro came back nicely from the right ankle
Sure did.
And Marcus Gilbert as well
What in the blue hell… Do we have ANY offensive lineman who aren’t cripples?
Reggie Bush is a big time asset
I thought he dumped the girl with the big-time asset.
Enough TMZ style gossip. What do we have to do to beat the Detroit Lions, Coach?
We need to tackle in general
Gotcha. Don’t jump off-sides. Tackle the guy with the football.
What a truly dizzying football intellect we have on our side!
What about Megatron? How are we gonna stop Megatron? Remember, we have had our problems with AJ Green.
Having seen AJ Green, there’s no comparison
Ohhhh… Nothing like Coach T throwing shade on a division opponent we’ll see twice a year.
He’s [Matthew Stafford] only been sacked 10 times in 9 games, which tells you a lot about him
It does? Here I thought preventing sacks was the job of the five rather rotund gentleman in front of him. Insight like this is why Mike Tomlin is the greatest head coach in Steelers history and I’m just a lowly blogger.
He makes GOOD and FAST decisions
Ah, I gotcha. He doesn’t get sacked because he makes GOOD and FAST (emphasis by Tomlin) decisions. It has nothing to do with the guys blocking for him. Or the offensive game plan. It’s all on the quarterback to know what he’s doing and do it quickly.
Clearly, the reason our quarterback has been sacked 31 times over that same span isn’t because our linemen suck. Or poor drafting by our coach and General Manager. Obviously the problem here in Pittsburgh is Big Ben is a Big Slow Dummy.
No wonder they want to trade him.
I’m not going to provide any more legs to an erroneous story
Fair enough. Let’s talk about our team. How about that Jonathan Dwyer! He had several big runs against the Bills and even threw some nice blocks on special teams.
Like where he is
As opposed to where he was eight weeks ago which was not on the team BECAUSE YOU CUT HIM.
So, do you think cutting an extremely useful player helped motivate him?
I would imagine unemployment does that
The sycophantic Steelers media laughed at this line. It is pretty funny.
Is last week’s result because of keep on keeping on or did you really change your approach?
Speaking of the sycophantic media, there was a new voice in the press room this week. Some chick who asked by far the most interesting and insightful questions, such as the one above. You could tell an actual hard-hitting question that calls him on his bullshit caught Mike Tomlin off-guard because he ended with “Take from that what you will.” Tomlin always gets snippy when challenged.
I couldn’t identify the lady reporter but I can only assume she’s not a 55 year old white guy who’s in the Steelers hip pocket which explains why her questions weren’t obsequious or asinine. Speaking of asinine media questions:
You won 3 of 5 since the 0-4 start
Is that really the lipstick we’re going to try and put on this pig of a season?
Spread football, which obviously all levels of football are leaning toward in recent years
“Grandaddy said run the football. Throwing the ball isn’t Steeler Football. We ran the football back in Grandaddy’s day. We gotta go back to Steeler Football. Steeler Football is winning football.”
I expect the attitude to be what it is so it’s not like I’m throwing a pep rally because the attitude is appropriate
Hear that players? There will be no pep rallies until the win total improves!