I understand why Larry Foote’s tight that a Pittsburgh Steelers teammate is running his jibs to the press and hiding behind the witness protection program of anonymous quotes.
The Steelers laid an egg last season, and someone is blaming it on LaMarr Woodley being out of shape and ineffective. The accuser, whose cloaked criticism was more like a horse collar than a helmet-on-helmet collision, didn’t leave a name.
Foote, a 10-year vet linebacker, says these types of gripes should be kept in-house and the player “broke the code.” Sorry to tell ya Larry, but that “code” went the way of backpack rap. The last-ditch effort to save it floundered with the “Stop Snitching” shirts that morphed into Obama and Diddy “Rock The Vote” tees.
The American Gangster series and Bio-channel documentaries on the lives of once-revered mythical drug kingpins, mass murderers and Mafioso, have thrown salt in the game, by exposing the fact that most of these stone-cold criminal enterprisers would rather sing to the Feds than do hard time alone behind steel gates.
These days, codes are made to be broken. Society increasingly praises those who have straight violated the trust of friends, defied oaths and the “no snitching” code of organizations bound by loyalty. Football, being an art form that often imitates life, is following suit.
Social media encourages people to talk tough, spread gossip and display intimate details behind a computer of anonymity. That’s the way things get done nowadays. You can’t knock a frustrated player for calling out what HC Mike Tomlin is supposed to be keeping under wraps.
If there is a rogue, malcontent and running amuck, then the Pittsburgh organization — who are usually on top of these things — has to identity him. Foote’s a bit old school, so he has the right to be pissed with the philosophical shift taking place in his locker room, but the bigger focus should be on Woodley. He talks a solid game and he’s basking in the Forbes money mix, so if he’s dogging it and the team’s losing games and cats are peeping his BS, then it’s about damn time somebody called him out. Now, it’s on Tomlin to make some heads roll, reassess, and get things in order for 2013.
