No, I don't want to discuss race and other societal issues here, either. It's a sports site. And we do all we can here to keep it that way.
But life will intersect with sports, and it'll do so with greater visibility than ever in our cyber-connected culture. So avoiding it altogether is not only impossible but also irresponsible.
Mike Tomlin stepped up big-time Monday.
He didn't just defend Mason Rudolph's reputation. He put his own on the line, partly by trusting Rudolph, partly by trusting the other Steelers and Browns on the field that day in Cleveland, but in the most prominent sense by simply being an honorable man.
Stop and think about his tenure here for a moment: Thirteen years now in the fishbowl of being Western Pennsylvania's highest-profile football figure, and the closest anyone can come to a negative syllable about his off-the-field behavior is that ... what, he'll occasionally hang out with Joey Porter? Or conduct a curt press conference?
Really, I can't come up with a thing.
So that's the first step of the process that occurred Monday, even if it's ongoing. Because no one takes anyone seriously on the subject of honor if they aren't honorable themselves. This extraordinarily intelligent, introspective and charitable individual does that.
The next step is that he invests in his players. For better or worse, he'll work to get to know them. He makes it part of the job, but it's performed with passion. I've witnessed that far more in Latrobe and in practices than in game settings. He'll find out how to push the buttons of everyone from Ben Roethlisberger right down to the spare kicker brought in for no reason beyond pushing Chris Boswell, right down to the undrafted quarterback from Samford University. Sometimes it won't amount to anything. Other times, that player will be all that separates the Steelers from playoffs.
Same applies for their families, their friends. It isn't nosy, from the way it's been described to me over the years, and it often isn't direct. He'll ask his assistants or other team employees. But he eventually gets to know, to understand.
And if you're a good one, in his eyes, he'll trust.
Tomlin trusts Rudolph.
He's known Rudolph since he and Kevin Colbert met him before the NFL Draft -- which is yet another reason the head coach's participation is so valuable at that stage -- and he's gotten to know him that much more in Pittsburgh. And he watched that kid, a genuinely good one as far as I've been able to see myself, go through hell and back this past season. Physically. Emotionally. The pressure from the public. And it had Tomlin, as he put it Monday, "hacked off" to have Myles Garrett vomit it back up for ESPN over the weekend.
So he broke from all previous norms for offseason access and piped up beautifully.
The whole thing, if you still haven't seen it:
Ladies and gentlemen, the adult in the room.
To repeat yet again, that's founded in trust.
Tomlin trusted, as he spoke, the other people out there when Garrett's infantile helmet-swinging stirred everything up.
“I was on the field immediately after that altercation,” he told ESPN. “I've got a lot of personal relationships within that organization over there in Cleveland. At no point did anyone within that organization come forward and say ‘Mike, heads up, we got a situation here,’ or something of that nature that you would expect that comes with those types of allegations.”
But he also trusted, above all, Rudolph.
Know why?
He's a players' coach.
And yeah, you knew I was going there, right?
That term gets tossed around a little too lightly for my taste by some in the Nation. Makes me cringe each time. It's cited as a negative. As if he coddles. As if he's distant or aloof. Or worse, in the most insidious context -- again, by some and not all -- because he's an African-American head coach presiding over a roster that's predominantly African-American, and therefore they're all buddy-buddy or brothers or whatever.
Hence, you hear, 'That wouldn't have happened under Chuck Noll,' or 'That wouldn't have happened under Bill Cowher,' even though both of Tomlin's legendary predecessors very much had their own challenges in managing players of all races. Imagine if Tomlin had a player who shot at a police helicopter, as Ernie Holmes did under Noll. Or if he'd basically looked the other way when Santonio Holmes was charged with domestic violence, as Cowher did.
Or, for that matter, since Tomlin's culture is often compared to that of Bill Belichick, if he'd presided over a player who'd literally gotten away with murder.
My goodness, he'd be fried alive.
I try not to use the word hate, but I've hated that term 'players' coach.' Just hated it forever.
But not anymore. In fact, after this, I'm going to use it all the time. Because Tomlin is that. He is a players' coach. In the best sense of the term.
In my many years of covering the Steelers, in countless conversations with players on or off the record, including with some who were angry with Tomlin or flat-out didn't like him, there's never been the tiniest trace that the man even sees color, much less reacts to it. And in the current society, where race seems to be getting senselessly injected in a lot of settings it doesn't belong, that's the best sense of the term.
That's the ideal, actually. There aren't white men or black men or brown men in this scenario.
As a certain someone put it ...
Leader of Men https://t.co/ISSluAWepy
— Mason Rudolph (@Rudolph2Mason) February 17, 2020
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