The Pittsburgh Steelers have long had a reputation as a hard-nosed, physical kind of football team, but this week Cody Wallace took it too far.
That style of play is part of the reason why they are so popular around the country. (Winning more Super Bowls than any other team in the NFL also probably has something to do with it.) The Steelers are what the TV commentators like to call a “national team.”
As the nature of football changes though more and more fans are getting turned off to the kinds of brutal hits that the NFL used to promote as part of its brand. This week Will Smith’s Concussion movie comes out and it’s likely to heat up the conversation about head injuries in the sport. No other long-term problem on the Commissioner’s desk is as important.
It’s possible that the Steelers’ style of football will one day soon be extinct from the professional game.
Case in point: watch this hit that Pittsburgh center Cody Wallace laid on Denver Broncos safety David Bruton Jr. during the first quarter of Sunday’s win:
That’s a pretty dangerous move to make no matter how you slice it, and Bruton was not happy about it. After the game he went as far as to call the Steelers a dirty team, per the Broncos’ twitter account:
“That’s just what the Steelers do. They’re dirty, and he left his feet trying to take me out.”
The NFL fined Wallace over $23,000 for the hit, but some Broncos players think that’s not enough and he should be suspended. T.J. Ward said that Wallace was totally out of line. Aqib Talib suggested that it was hypocritical of the NFL to suspend him for poking somebody in the eye and not Wallace for laying a helmet-to-helmet hit.
As much as we might like bone-jarring hits (the likes of which James Harrison built his career on) there’s simply no place in the NFL for the kind of blow that Wallace laid on Bruton.
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Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the Broncos have it right. The NFL needs to start seriously punishing players who deliberately take head shots. Suspending Wallace would be a step in the right direction.