Tag: Football

Deserve’s Got Nothin’ To Do With It

Fun week for NFL-based popularity contests. In the span of just a couple of days, we have one person getting an award they probably didn’t deserve, another NOT getting an award he almost certainly did… and people losing their shit about both.

For those not up on their American football (please don’t call it “sportsball” or “hand-egg”, I’m begging you), the two cases are:

  • Cleveland Browns’ rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who played in less than half his team’s games, and was… how shall we put this?… “a work in progress” even when did play, was selected as a reserve for the NFL’s Pro Bowl (festivities). Think “All-Star Game”, except it’s not a game of 11-on-11 football, but a skills competition and some 7-on-7 flag football.
  • Long-time New England Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick, who guided the Patriots to 6 Super Bowls, was NOT selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first appearance on the ballot.

For those who don’t follow the NFL, the Pro Bowl has kind of been a running joke for a while now. Even when it was still a “real” game of football, nobody took it all that seriously because a) it’s held at the end of the season and everyone’s ready to take the pads off and relax and b) nobody wants to blow-out an ACL and fuck up their career trajectory because they were going all-out in an exhibition game. Also, it used to at least be a free trip to Hawaii, and now it’s just played wherever the Super Bowl is, so — surprise, surprise — dudes weren’t lining up for a trip to San Francisco on a Tuesday in February.

(I mean, if you want a barometer of how seriously the game is taken, during one Pro Bowl, NFC center Jeff Saturday lined up for THE OTHER TEAM so he could snap the ball to his long-time teammate Peyton Manning, who was playing for the AFC.)

The point is, SEVERAL of the game’s stars pass on the Pro Bowl every year, and the league has to scramble to fill the slots. It’s the definition of business as usual. This time around, they took Shedeur Sanders, who… all fluffery aside… ranked 40th in QBR (ESPN’s attempt to create a one-number stat for QB performance). 32 teams… came in 40th… math doesn’t care about your feelings.

BUT… what Shedeur Sanders does have is “brand recognition”. First, he’s the son of NFL Hall of Famer/sometimes-TV-analyst/college coach/cowboy hat aficcionado Deion Sanders, one of the best to play the game. He’s also got history in that he had a weird NFL draft cycle in 2025– this time last year people were talking about him as not just the first QB taken, but a possible candidate to be taken #1 overall… and he ended up falling to the 5th round. So multiple teams that NEEDED quarterbacks (including my hometown Steelers) passed on him… more than once. So he’s a guy whose career people have been following with interest, regardless of his stats line looks like.

So… they gave the kid a spot because he might draw some eyeballs that luminaries such as Geno Smith or Marcus Mariota might not draw. And on THAT level, so what? The Pro Bowl Mid-Week Spectacle For Degenerate Gamblers To Wager On, Presented By FanDuel is an entertainment product, so… give the people something that might entertain them. Not that big a deal.

The only place I maybe push back a LITTLE is that there’s a body of Hot Takes from Browns’ fans and people who thought Shedeur got a raw deal back at the draft that are positioning this as a Vindication(tm). Indeed, that Shedeur has Proven The Haters Wrong(tm). Now, I don’t really have any animosity toward the kid outside the confines of the Steelers-Browns rivalry, and Shedeur himself has handled his selection with nothing but graciousness. But I mean… come on. Is that what we’re doing now?

Definitionally, vindication isn’t going to be found throwing flag football touchdowns in a game that’s going to be forgotten the second the whistle blows. Vindication is going to be found by coming back in 2026, starting 17 games, and completing 60 or 65 percent of his passes. If he does that, then yeah… THAT’S vindication. If he doesn’t do that, “Shedeur Sanders, Former Pro Bowler” may end up just being an interesting Jeopardy! question or a chyron on a Toronto Argonauts broadcast.

So now… Bill Belichick.

Much as it pains me to say it, if Bill Belichick isn’t a Hall of Fame coach, nobody is. And pass-fail, there’s a pretty clear case to be made that he should’ve been a first-ballot selection. Six Super Bowl rings, 302 career wins (3rd all time behind Don Shula and George Halas)… there’s really not much more you can do as a coach.

But still… some of the outrage feels a little over the top. He’s almost certainly getting in eventually. (In fact, I’ve got 20 bucks that says the NFL not-too-subtly attempts to whip the votes for him next year just to make sure this doesn’t remain an ongoing story.) He just didn’t make it this time.

First, there ARE blemishes on Belichick’s career. There’s Spygate, where he was sending Patriots’ personnel to record opponents’ practices so they could decipher their sideline signals, which is… not to put too fine a point on it… illegal. The Patriots were fined and had to give up draft picks at the time. There’s DeflateGate, where the Patriots would deflate the balls Tom Brady used so he could grip them better. Also illegal (the league DOES let teams set up the balls for their QB, but it’s required to be within a certain range of pressure); also resulted in fines and Brady actually got suspended. Belichick was also generally kind of a grumpy dude when dealing with the press. He’d do shit like list his ENTIRE team as Questionable on the injured report just to keep information from getting out, and… a LOT of really terse, combative answers over the years. Should that keep him out? Probably not… but on a HUMAN level, you can sorta understand Hall of Fame voters — most of whom are sportswriters whose jobs he made harder — meeting the same energy he put out into the world.

There’s even just the possibility that this was a “flaw” inherent to the voting system. Without getting into the deep weeds, there were five candidates on the supplementary ballot they use for coaches, owners, and players who fell off the “modern” ballot, and voters are only allowed to vote for three people. So it’s entirely possible you had a few voters who decided “well, Belichick’s getting in anyway, so maybe I’ll use three of my votes on guys who need the help more”. (The “other guys” were Patriot owner Robert Kraft, and players Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood.) If enough voters did that, you could easily end up with the “obvious” candidate missing the cut. Not to mention the possibilty of a vote split between Kraft and Belichick — maybe voters just didn’t want to vote for both and make it a Patriot lovefest.

Lastly, I have a personal pet theory: Tom Brady is eligible in 2028. What if Belichick didn’t get in this year because a few voters romanticized the notion of putting them in together? People always wrestle with who was more responsible for the Brady-Belichick Patriots'(tm) success… maybe some voters are ducking the question for two years so they don’t have to decide, so they can put them in as a tandem.

So pass-fail… should Belichick have gotten the votes? Yeah, probably. Does it represent some sort of crime against humanity and the ghost of Walter Camp? I guess YOU can take it that way if you want, but I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.

But more forest for the trees… this is what happens when you try to hammer Jell-O to a wall by attempting to put “greatness” in a one-size-fits-all box. It’s true across sports, but everyone’s got their own definition: some people hew pretty close to what the statistical record says (the J. Evans Pritchard method), some people take — for lack of a less sappy word — a more “holistic” view of stardom, and there’s probably even a few people who just vote for what made them feel good as a fan. And that’s OK. First-ballot? Unanimous selection? Whatever, man… over the long haul, the various systems get it right more than they get it wrong, and it gives us something to shout about over beers when there’s nothing else on TV.

Requiem For The Standard

I look at Mike Tomlin’s departure from the Pittsburgh Steelers after 19 years the same way I look at divorce. Not every story has a villain; not every divorce ends in cheating, abuse, or other dramatic acrimony. Sometimes people just grow apart; so too with football coaches, teams, and their fan bases.

I think in today’s “hot take” culture, it’s easy to fish for the extreme take: “Tomlin sucks; good riddance” vs. the scolding “be careful what you wish for, Steeler fans, you just got it”. But I think with the truth is somewhere in the middle — Tomlin was a decent coach, but I think it’s a fair criticism that complacency just set in, and at SOME point, something was going to have to change. Whether this off-season is the right or the wrong time to pull the pin on that grenade… I guess we’re going to find out.

The good is right up there in the record books: zero losing seasons in a 19-year career. Some people kinda brush that off, but yes, that is an achievement. 31 out of 32 teams end every season disappointed, but the Steelers never felt IRRELEVANT on his watch — some organizations can’t even say that. If Tomlin ought to be dinged for the years he underachieved with a 12 or 13-win team, he probably ought to earn some praise for the years the Steelers looked like a 5 or 6 win team on paper and he somehow navigated them to respectability. And dudes LOVED to play for him. I don’t think that makes a difference for STAR players, who just want to get paid as much as possible, but it when it came to signing veteran depth guys, it’s a competitive advantage I think we may come to miss. I’m not sure Pittsburgh is as much of a “destination” without Tomlin at the helm. (Especially not if you read those NFL player surveys that rank the Steelers toward the bottom of the league in terms of facilities and organizational culture.)

But the warts are also equally evident. The most obvious is the recent playoff record — it’s not just that we went 0-7 in recent playoff memory, but few of those games even felt competitive. Weird choices in game management — playcalling, clock management, and such — brushed off with some Tomlinism that didn’t really explain the thought process that went into it. The Steelers managed to play down to the level of at least one inferior opponent per season; so much so that the fanbase collectively seemed to fear the trap game against some 3-9 team more than playing the Ravens. Every opposing tight end in the league probably circled us on the calendar because we seemed to be incapable of covering one properly. (Though… I suppose that complaint even goes back to Cowher. ALFRED F’ING PUPUNU.)

And for a guy who brought the world “we do not live in our fears”, the Steelers sure feel like a team that’s been playing fearfully in recent years: playing NOT to lose, rather than to win. The pathological aversion to throwing to the middle of the field (BUBBLE SCREENS… BUBBLE SCREENS FOR EVERYONE!). Going too conservative, too early when we had a lead, letting teams claw their way back in it. The “keep the play in front of you, give up small chunks, and hope you can get a splash play or the offense makes a mistake before they string 12 plays together” defense. With the Cowher Steelers and even the EARLY Tomlin years, we didn’t play that way. We played to win; sometimes we even stepped on a team’s neck and ran it up on them. If this move is an acknowledgement that we need to get back to that mentality… I’m here for it.

Of course the elephant in the room is the ONE thing that can’t be solved by letting your coach walk: this is a quarterback-driven league, and we haven’t had a quarterback for a good chunk of that 0-7 run. The thing we don’t really know (because there’s not any Hard Knocks footage to dissect) is how to apportion the blame: how much is Tomlin’s fault for his choices of coordinators and coaching, and how much of that is the front office burying their head in the sand during Ben’s decline phase and not creating a more graceful transition?

(Hey, remember when Lamar Jackson was just sitting there and we took Terrell Edmunds instead? Pepperidge Farms remembers.)

So what comes next?

For the Steelers, if they stick with the recipe, it’s going to be a young defensive coordinator who’s never been a head coach before. I would argue that the game has changed and we need an offensive mind, but given that they’re 3-for-3 on coaching hires during my lifetime, I’m willing to trust the process. Though, I kinda like Brian Flores, so if they’re willing to be a little flexible on the “never coached before” check-box, I don’t think that’s a bad outcome.

I have heard a few people say “well, who would any coach want the Steelers’ job?” You mean the one job that if you get it right, you might get two decades of job security because it’s a old-school family-run organization that thinks coaching churn is embarrassing in some way? WHO INDEED? But I’d also say that the Steelers have some pieces in place to be a decent team… it’s just that they’re missing the ONE piece that’s most important. Yeah, the Ravens probably have an edge because Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry are pretty plug-and-play, and the Giants might be intriguing if you’re a coach who believes in Jaxson Dart… but I don’t think the Steelers represent some black hole like the Browns or Titans still largely are.

As for Tomlin? Does he want to do TV? Were they actually going to fire him, and “walking away” was a negotiated exit? Does he secretly want to coach again, but just wanted out of Pittsburgh? Is he going to lean into his resemblance to Omar Epps and do a reality show where they Freaky Friday each other’s lives, with Epps coaching a football team and Tomlin going to acting auditions?

It’s not that I don’t care; it’s more that Bill Cowher’s departure cured me of my interest in speculating too aggressively about guys’ reasons for stepping away. If you remember Cowher leaving, everyone was freaking out because How Could He Walk Away At The Height Of A Dynasty?(tm) And then we learned several years later it was probably to spend time with his wife, who it turned out was battling cancer, but he just kept that part of his life private. So if Tomlin says he wants to step away… HOWEVER that might have come about behind the scenes or what his future plans are… I guess that’s what the man’s doing. As a wise man once said, “we want volunteers, not hostages”, and that includes the head coach.

So… thanks for 19 great years, Coach T. It’s been a fun ride, I hope you have a good… break, retirement, whatever this ends up being… and we’ll see you if and when you wish to be seen.