Former Pittsburgh Steelers WR Antonio Brown purchases billboards thanking Steelers fans.
If you ask most football fans to give you one word to describe my Pittsburgh Steelers over the past 50 years, the most appropriate and likely would be STABILITY!
Over the course of this time, the team has had a grand total of three coaches and the same family ownership since its founding inception. By contrast, the Cleveland Brown have had 19 coaches over the same period. The Steelers are among the tops in Super Bowl and playoff wins, as well as Hall of Fame players. The team just completed its 15th consecutive season with at least eight wins…the 5th longest streak in NFL history.
The history and facts are without dispute.
So, why are so many implying that the drama that has surrounded running back Le’Veon Bell and now former Steelers receiver Antonio Brown is at odds with this stability? The implication is that the presence of stability equals the absence of drama.
Nonsense!
There is not a workplace in America that does not have drama, in varying degrees, regardless of how stable its management is. The authoritative management makes it a point to suppress the drama from external examination, much in the same way that some countries suppress descent. Surely, you would never consider this to be the absence of descent?
There are four factors at play here:
- The Steelers have been able to draft and develop players remarkably well and as a result, allow free agents to leave before the disgruntlement boils over, without skipping a competitive beat;
- Pittsburgh is a mid-sized market. Can you imagine the attention a franchise this successful would have gotten if it were in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles?;
- Social Media makes it near impossible to suppress unrest. One might call it the commodification of drama. Surely, no one believes the messy dynamics of marriage started with the real housewives? Furthermore, this speaks to a larger media literacy deficit that afflicts the society well beyond sports. That deficit is reflected in the notion that if you did not see it in corporate media, it must not have happened. I can assure you that corporate media has been missing in action on a number of issues. The fact that they pay little to no attention to the remarkable academic achievements of African/Black women in America or the oppressive treatment of Palestinians largely underwritten by US taxpayers in the Occupied Territories, does not mean that neither is happening;
- And most importantly, the Steelers have not won to the level one would expect for their talent. There is a phrase in sports that says “winning is the great deodorizer”. My Steelers went 9-6-1 this past year, to include five one-possession losses. Turn one of those games and they are in the playoffs, and if they win one game, Antonio Brown is still in the fold.
Former Steelers RB, Le’Veon Bell is now a New York Jet.
To be clear, drama in Steeler Nation did not start with Le’Veon Bell or Antonio Brown.
In the middle of the 1974 season, Hall of Fame defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Green came very close to quitting the team. He would go on to win his second Defensive Player of the Year award in 3 years and the Steelers won the Super Bowl that year. Few outside of the inner Steelers circle knew about this until his feature on “A Football Life”. QB Terry Bradshaw and the late great Coach Chuck Noll never got along. Noll’s response when asked about his relationship with Bradshaw was as follows, “Terry and I had a business relationship. I’d say it was pretty successful!”
Bam! Drop the mic.
Winning hides drama. Joe Montana and Steve Young were hardly friends in San Francisco. Belichick and Brady have their degree of drama. It is the nature of the beast.
None of this is to say that losing Brown and Bell will not hurt. Brown has put together, statistically, the best 6 years of any receiver in NFL history. He and Bell were as productive of a WR/RB tandem as the league has seen since, perhaps Falk/Holt or Bruce in St Louis, or Rice/Craig in San Francisco.
As a card-carrying member of #SteelerNation since 1972, I am pissed!
As a fan of labor sticking it to management, I absolutely love what Brown did.
Regardless of his tactics, the bottom line is that the man had the leverage to leave where he no longer wanted to be and secured an additional $30 Million guaranteed in the process. For those who call him spoiled and selfish for doing so, I ask: what do you think America is all about? It is very rare when an individual has the capacity to determine his/her own destiny. Why on Earth would the rest of labor vilify him/her and side with management?
His power play is not new. Both John Elway and Eli Manning pulled similar power plays before either had done anything in the league.
Therefore, at the end of the day, I am at peace with the current state of my Steelers. I do not like it but I am at peace. After all, if any franchise can survive such upheaval and remain competitive, it is Pittsburgh. Of that, I am STEEL CERTAIN!
Gus Griffin, for War Room Sports
Tags: All's Fair in Sports and War, Antonio Brown, Gus Griffin, Le'Veon Bell, Pittsburgh Steelers, War Room Sports, WRS