STEELERS top player drops a massenge that he want to go and never return…”I won’t play again.”
Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Diontae Johnson apologised to team-mates this week after quitting on a play against the Cincinnati Bengals. In her latest column, former Buffalo Bills coach Phoebe Schecter takes us inside an NFL locker room as she shares her thoughts on the incident…
You have to immediately know that everybody is going to see that when they watch the film the next week, especially on that interception, and so you have to come at it and attack it.
You can’t let behaviour like that go away, and I’ve been a part of teams that have had a toxic player where it kind of seeps in, and if you allow that you teach it and say that behaviour is okay and then others start to lose respect. So you can very easily lose the locker room based off of not addressing something like that.
![Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Diontae Johnson came under fire this week](https://i0.wp.com/e1.365dm.com/23/11/768x432/skysports-diontae-johnson-pittsburgh-steelers_6377750.jpg?resize=628%2C353&ssl=1)
We have seen it for a few weeks in Pittsburgh, where there has already been a few disgruntled moments from players and confrontations within the Steelers locker room, and Diontae Johnson was involved in one of them before Sunday. You can tell something was perhaps boiling over, but if you have a veteran quitting on a play like that, they are quitting on other areas of their job too.
What do they look like when they are at walkthroughs? What is their effort in film study and in the classroom? Or have they given up there too?
I get it in terms of that it’s a run play and he’s not going to get involved, he’s not trying to sell anything in the passing game, but you should never behave that way. There is the turnover and they are literally past you.
The bigger issue is that every player has a role to play in their team, because ultimately if one person does not do their job that could be the equivalent of not being able to feed your family, right? That’s how players think when you are in that building.
You look at that guy who quit on a play and say, that’s the reason I potentially won’t be able to put food on the table for my family, so to speak. That’s what football is and what it means to them. Football is how they live, and when you don’t take care of it, when you don’t even try to make an effort, you end up in this really poor situation.
Veterans and leaders of a team will always pull up players in the locker room for moments like that. I have been in some locker rooms where they step back and say ‘fight it out’ and let them go for it if it means resolving it. If you guys need a fight, they almost encourage some sort of fighting.
You need the veterans who are going to step up and talk to them, and allow those vets to have that conversation but also feedback and say, ‘hey, this guy is is not going to change, they have checked out’. It is a tough situation, but you do have to think, ‘am I going to keep this guy on to the end of season? Do we think he’s going to change or do we let him go because actually he’s hurting the team more than he’s helping them from a culture perspective?’