After another embarrassing defensive performance and loss in front of the home crowd, Pittsburgh Steelers fans are at their limit. You don’t have to go to shady corners of the internet to find the “Fire Mike Tomlin, Fire Teryl Austin, Fire everyone” crowd anymore. They are front and center.
Usually, it's just the fans leading the charge, though. And as fans, we don’t want to admit it, but we carry more emotion than business sense when it comes to the home team. The NFL is a business, and it’s a business forged by relationships, often over outcomes.
But anytime a former player says what most fans are thinking, those rabid fans on the internet don’t sound quite as crazy as before, especially when that former player is former All-Pro linebacker James Harrison.
Pittsburgh Steelers legend James Harrison calls out the highest-paid defense in football for coming up small
On his podcast with Joe Haden, Deebo and Joe, Harrison had what can only be described as a justified crash out, laying into the Steelers’ defense and the organization as a whole.
“We are freaking cooked,” Harrison said. “We’re the 30th-ranked defense in the NFL. We’re the highest-paid defense in the NFL. Those two things don’t go together. Primetime. Sunday night. What the [expletive] are we doing?”
Haden tried to be a voice of reason for Harrison during his rant, but Harrison, much like the vocal portion of the fanbase, can’t sit right with the play of the defense he once commanded.
For the second-straight game, the Steelers allowed over 450 yards of offense. For the third-straight game, the Steelers didn’t force any takeaways. For the third time this season, the Steelers lost and looked like chumps doing it.
“Things gotta get changed. People gotta go,” Harrison said. “Highest-paid, 30th-ranked, don’t match.I don’t know what needs to happen, but we need to go on ahead and maybe redo this whole thing and get something else going.”
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Harrison’s pleading falls on deaf ears just as the same as fans, especially at this point in the season. Pittsburgh isn’t going to fire Mike Tomlin, and it’s highly unlikely that he’ll fire Teryl Austin. Depending on the course of the season, there might be some changes in the coaching staff, but Tomlin will be in Pittsburgh as long as he wants to. As for his staff, they’ll be there as long as he wants them there.
Mike Tomlin indicated after the loss to Green Bay that there are issues in the scheme and in the execution by the players. To Harrison’s point, those are wholly unacceptable issues to have with a stable coaching staff and a defense full of veterans. The current efforts from the defense from the top down have a lot in common with the definition of insanity—it’s the same thing, over and over, expecting different results.
Haden’s efforts to calm Harrison down are the voice of the Steelers’ organization, though. 'It’ll be okay, the Steelers will win some more games, and they’ll be in the hunt in December.' And he’s right, they will. But that’s the full cycle of Steelers football right now for its fans and the players like Harrison who give a damn.