Steelers declare ping-pong and pool off-limits to younger players

When your team goes 0-2 for the first time since 2002 you start looking around your house for reasons. Is there a lack of sweat in the weight room, too much shuteye in the film room or discord in the locker room?

Well around the Pittsburgh Steelers compound, it's apparently because players are having too much fun in the rec room.

After dissecting game film and looking over the roster, the Steelers have discovered the reason for their dismal 0-2 start — and they are blaming it on the kids playing too much ping-pong and pool.

As reported Thursday afternoon by KDKA-TV’s Jory Rand, Steelers veterans have decided to ban anyone with less than four years of pro experience from picking up a paddle or a cue stick at the team’s South Side training facility during “business hours.” According to 12th-year NFL safety Ryan Clark, this was decided in a meeting of the Steelers’ more tenured players Wednesday and the restrictions were prominently posted on the wall.

Rand posted this on Twitter:

I asked Ryan Clark if the signs were new. "Did you see them there yesterday?" He would only add it was their meeting not a public meeting.
— Jory Rand (@JoryRand) September 19, 2013

Isaac Redman, who is in his 4th season, thus barely qualifying him to play, was happy to tell me he enjoyed a game of pool this morning.
— Jory Rand (@JoryRand) September 19, 2013

Later, Rand reported, those signs were taken down. But the message still permeates throughout the locker room.

"Young guys can't play pool, ping pong or shuffleboard. Sucks to be a young guy, I guess," Redman said later. "We need to win a football game here before guys are coming in worrying about who's first on the pool table. So that eliminates that."

Instead of a public spanking in front of the media, couldn't the Steelers’ veterans just have easily informed their younger teammates in private? It sounds like bad parenting.

Tom Coughlin calls Giants defense 'soft'

After Sunday's 24-20 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck said his team was "mushed" around by the Steelers offensive line after third-string running back Isaac Redman plowed through Big Blue's defense for a career- high 147 yards.

Head coach Tom Coughlin was more straightforward in his assessment of the team and used the "S" word to describe the Giants defense.

"It was soft, no question," Coughlin told the Star-Ledger on Monday.

"It was soft early," he said.  "We came back and played a little bit better and they had their breakout there at the end of the game."

Tuck didn't disagree with his coach that the defense was more pliable than a roll of Charmin.

"Not to the point where they were more physical than us," said Tuck.  "But to the point where you got a guy in the gap and Redman was just behind his guard, behind his guard, and a guy jumps out of his gap trying to get around to get Redman and he kind of like filters forward for three more, four more yards, and that's just us got to do a better job of escaping blocks and getting to the ball carrier."

Granted, the Giants were without three linebackers including Chase Blackburn — who spearheads the defense.

"We had some poor tackling, I think," observed Blackburn.  "Even the runs that were hit for 3-4 yard gains, we hit them at minus one or one yard or at the line of scrimmage and he [Redman] just continued to roll forward a little bit."

The Giants travel to Cincinnati to play the Bengals on Sunday.  The Bengals have lost four straight but — as history will attest — the Giants have lost on five straight road trips to Tigerland since 1972.

The Giants run defense is ranked 19th in the NFL at 118 yards per game.

"It's so correctable and that's the frustrating thing," said Tuck.  "Most times you'd rather just get your butt whipped up front and say, 'Well, I did my best and they still beat me.'  we had some things that we could've easily corrected."

The "S" word.  Good for describing babies' behinds or Kenny G's rock but not the Giants D.