Steely McBeam
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- Mar 20, 2019
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In response to former Steelers linebacker James Harrison’s claim that Steelers coach Mike Tomlin gave Harrison “an envelope” after a $75,000 fine in 2010, the NFL has said “no comment,” Steelers president Art Rooney II has issued a statement denying the contention, and Harrison’s agent has tried to scrape toothpaste back into the tube. So far, Tomlin hasn’t said a word.
If Tomlin didn’t do it, he should say so. By not shouting it down, Tomlin invites speculation that Harrison, who was praising Tomlin not blowing the whistle on him, was telling the truth.
Frankly, it’s not a stretch to believe Harrison. The fine came at a time when the NFL was trying to change the culture of headhunting. Plenty of players, coaches, and executives didn’t like it. Tomlin thought Harrison’s hit was legal. Rooney thought it was legal. And Tomlin needs his players to not be thinking twice about legal hits being called illegal, or the Steelers will lose more games than they win.
Consider this: In 2011, the league office fined then-Steelers safety Ryan Clark $40,000 for an illegal helmet-to-helmet hit. Clark told reporters that Tomlin actually praised Clark for the hit during film review after the game in which it happened.
“This is something we watched in slow-mo as a team — as a team — to say, ‘If you’re gonna try to dislodge the ball from somebody, this is the way you should do it,” Clark said at the time. “This is the legal way you should do it.'”
Clark’s comments caught the attention of the league office, resulting in a meeting between the Commissioner, Tomlin, and Rooney.
This was 2011, a year after Tomlin supposedly gave Harrison “an envelope” after Harrison was fined for playing the game the way Tomlin wants (or at least wanted at the time) his players to play it. And it was several months before the Saints’ bounty scandal sent a clear message to all teams that envelopes to players for legal or illegal hits would spark major consequences.
It’s unclear when Tomlin finally got the message, but even after the bounty punishments were issued, Tomlin was publicly saying things that simply don’t mesh with the current mindset regarding the brutality of football.
“One of the reasons I work in the National Football League, I’m tired of the NCAA rules,” Tomlin said while being inducted into the William & Mary Hall of Fame in May 2012. “I am a win-at-all-costs kind of guy. The NFL is just right for me, although I am not a bounty guy in any form or fashion. Any form or fashion. . . . What you’ve got to understand about the Pittsburgh Steelers is . . . I ain’t got to offer them anything. Guys like James Harrison — they’ll do it for nothing.”
They’ll do it for nothing, but sometimes they’ll have money taken from their pockets for doing it. In those settings, is it crazy to think that the coach would replace the money that a player has lost for doing his job the way the coach wants him to do it?
None of this means that anything will come of this. If it happened two years ago, yes. For anything that happened before the bounty scandal, that hole has been plugged with cement and a “nothing to see here” sign has been nailed to a nearby tree.
But Harrison’s claims, if true, mesh with the broader mindset that many had as the league was working its way through a rocky transition that began with a 2009 Congressional inquiry, continued with the trio of big hits that happened on October 17, 2010 (Harrison’s hit was one of them), and culminated in a massive class action against the league for concealing from players the risks of repeated head trauma.