* It comes with the job. The job pays a lot of money. The industry actively cultivates passion among its customers and has come to identify them with a word that's a derivative of "fanatic." I get all that. I get that coaches in the NFL - both the head guys and the assistants - are heavily scrutinized and criticized.
* And when a team disappoints/underachieves, as these Steelers have through the first eight of their 16-game schedule this season, there are going to be fingers pointed at them, there are going to be people who want to see them get fired.
* I get a fair number of those kinds of submissions for the thrice-weekly installments of Asked and Answered, and while I refuse to entertain them because I consider firing people a very, very serious job and a job that is certainly not mine, what is somewhat amusing is the manner in which the individual gets around to making that point/demand.
* There are those who choose to begin with some variation of "I've been a Steelers fan for (insert some number that never seems to be less than 40) years" before making a case for Mike Tomlin's immediate unemployment. What gets me with these is that if they've actually been a life-long Steelers fan, as they so proudly proclaim, don't they come into it knowing the franchise doesn't make rash moves, especially with coaches?
* The other amusing approach begins as more of an attempt to enlist an ally in a cause, before coming to the inevitable conclusion that all reasonable people would agree (insert name here) deserves to be on "the hot seat." And apparently those quotation marks are mandatory.
* But anyway, do the quotation marks hold some sort of significance, because what precisely does "on the hot seat" mean? What are the consequences? Is it anything like "double secret probation" at Faber College? Does it mean a trip to Dean Wormer's office?*

PHOTOS: Practice - Cowboys Week - Day 2
* Anyway, another peculiarity from the fire-the-coach crowd comes in the choices it makes as to which coaches deserve to lose their jobs, or maybe more accurately in this instance, which ones should be spared. For example, there seems to be no hesitation to go after a defensive backs coach because of the low number of interceptions, but nobody wants an offensive line coach fired after the running game gets stuffed. As an example.
* One of the misconceptions feeding this line of "thought" about football that has grown along with the explosion of talking heads bloviating on 24-hour sports stations is "it's a chess match," that coaches are master puppeteers manipulating players and orchestrating all of the action on the field. Or to use a comparison the 140-character generation might better understand, as though the football played in NFL stadiums each weekend is somehow a glorified video game, instead of 60 minutes of organized mayhem committed via bursts of activity by 22 human beings at a time.
* And this portrayal of football is only as old as cable TV, because when I was growing up and learning to love the NFL, I never remember Vince Lombardi out-coaching anybody or winning any games because of clever halftime adjustments. Hey, you lifelong Steelers fans out there, do you look back on any of those 1970s Super Bowls as having been won by Chuck Noll out-coaching the other guy?
* Mark Malone once told me a story about his rookie training camp at Saint Vincent College, where the offensive coaches were installing the proper response to what was the cutting-edge coverage at the time. Malone said this new coverage had the safeties line up perpendicular to the line of scrimmage, one behind the other, instead of the more traditional parallel to the line of scrimmage alignment, next to each other.
* Malone said the coaches were teaching how to read the coverage and how to counteract it, and all of the various checks and adjustments necessary by both the quarterback and the receivers to avoid the interceptions this was designed to create. Malone, always a studious player, said he was having trouble grasping all of the intricacies, and so after a couple of days of struggling, he decided to walk down the hall to visit Terry Bradshaw's dorm room after lunch to seek the veteran's counsel before going onto the field for that afternoon's practice.

Agree to Disagree - vs. Cowboys
Share:*
* He said he knocked on the door and found Bradshaw sitting on the bed, strumming his guitar. His playbook was thrown into the corner on a pile of clothes. After asking Bradshaw how he handled this new coverage, he said Bradshaw looked at him and said, "I don't care where they line up those safeties. I just drop back, look for Swann or Stallworth, throw it high and hard, and just let them go up and get it."
* Now that's good coaching.
http://m.steelers.com/news/labriola...e-zebras/e64f4d0a-54e8-44be-a4a0-26b8f72bab68
Sent from my HTC6535LVW using
Steeler Nation mobile app