`Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach Mike Tomlin wants nothing to do with football players who want to kneel during the national anthem. As we’ve reported before, he finds them to be an unwelcome distraction, regardless of what policies the mainstream media may or may not have reported in the past.
Our assessment turned out to be true, and players slowly either stopped the nonsense or left the team on their own. The last holdout, Defensive End DaJoe Barron, found out the hard way that he doesn’t make the rules.
“You’re cut. Free agent. Go protest somewhere else,” Tomlin said, probably. “We don’t need the negative attention.”
Barron says he’ll seek help from the Player’s Association but they don’t seem very hopeful. Union spokesman Art Tubolls said the issue with this particular case is the motive and actionability. Nobody can quite figure out why these stories still get so much attention, and you can’t really litigate something that didn’t happen.
So the Steelers will move forward without Barron, who led the league in tackles in 2016. He has two Super Bowl rings and once rode in a Jeep from Fort Lauderdale to Miami with Drew Bledsoe. The incident went down in history as “the ride that never was.” Those close to Bledsoe say the only reason for it at all was to get past the 200-word minimum on this ridiculous story.