Browns head coach Todd Monken clapped back — in a cool, spicy kind of way — at Mike Tomlin after the former longtime Pittsburgh Steelers head coach and now first-year “NBC Football Night in America” analyst took a shot at the orange helmets a week and a half ago, following Cleveland’s blowout 34-10 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars in the season opener.
You know the old Pittsburgh crack, “The Browns is the Browns.”
Monken’s stick-it-in-your-ear — or somewhere else — came after his club captured one of its most impressive wins of the expansion era, 23-19 over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last Sunday as the Browns closed out the game following a lengthy storm delay.
As I’ve said before countless times, I Iike Tomlin. I like him a lot. I really do. He’s a good guy and was a great head coach for Pittsburgh for almost two decades. But, in an analyst’s role in a public setting on a national telecast, and considering the prickly 75-year rivalry between the Browns and Steelers, his words come off as very sophomoric and unprofessional. The players currently on these two teams can spit at each other like that, but not a former coach who needs to act as if he’s an adult, not somebody guzzling Iron City beer and waving a Terrible Towel with a bunch of yuns.
In any event, let’s look at the Steelers.
They haven’t won a playoff game in the last 10 years, all under Tomlin.
“The Steelers is the Steelers.”
Pittsburgh has lost six of its last seven games against the Browns in Cleveland, all under Tomlin.
“The Steelers is the Steelers.”
And the Steelers offense under first Tomlin and now new head coach Mike McCarthy, one coach who is retired and the other one who may eventually be forced to retire or be fired if this keeps up, is so antiquated that it looks like something from a 1980s highlights reel. And it’s being run, perhaps appropriately so, by over-the-hill quarterback Aaron Rodgers because the club, due in no small part to Tomlin’s contributions, or lack thereof, has been unable to find a successor to Ben Roethlisberger better than Mason Rudolph or Rudolph Mason or whatever the heck his name is. The only things missing at the team’s University of Pittsburgh Medical Center practice facility are a shuffleboard court, a bingo night and a seniors early-bird special buffet restaurant.
Yup, “the Steelers is the Steelers.” Thanks, Mike, for helping us to see it, and revel in it.
Steve King
