Mike Tomlin

So in that sense, they're kind of the same old Steelers of this season.

What do you always call it?

High-end mediocrity?

Yes.

Joe.

So there's that.

C.J.

Stroud, yeah, I don't think anybody would put him in the same tier as Mahomes, Allen, or even Lamar.

But it'll be interesting for me to see, like, hey, is this going to be another game where the stark reality is you don't have one of the up-and-coming stars at quarterback in the AFC, and you're reminded of that in the first round of the playoffs, in the wildcard round.

So that stands out to me as a juicy subplot as well.

limits why don't you uh play a couple of clips from the tomlin news conference and we'll give the mongoose center stage here i'd love to i first would like to bring this to your attention brian because tomlin does not like when miles garrett is brought to his mike you guys uh the office struggled into the brown you guys were putting the effort in to stop miles garrett as a pass rusher now you're dealing with two elite as russian threats how do you guys

make the plan work and pass protection while avoiding the pitfalls that hit you guys against the Browns in the offense.

Is that one of those Shakespeare thou doth protest too much type of answers there, right?

I think maybe I made this point last week on the show with Austin, but I think there's a little bit of a sliver of truth in between.

Yeah, you did nothing different schematically versus the Cleveland side of it, which is, oh, you changed your whole game plan to keep this guy out of the box score.

I think there's a

There's a gray area.

There's a middle of the Venn diagram where, yes, the Steelers did what they often do to try to minimize Garrett like they did in that first game, but that Aaron Rodgers himself was sort of making some decisions of, I'm not even going to attempt to extend this play or hold on to this ball a little longer for something to develop because we can get out of here with a win and we can get out of here...

without Garrett getting that record on us and potentially knocking me out of the rest of the season with a sack.

So I get what Tomlin's saying, but yeah, that struck me.