While the Pittsburgh Steelers searched high and low for a wide receiver, they didn’t look at Tyler Boyd. Despite being a local product who went to Pitt, he has not ingratiated himself to the Steelers since the beginning. And apparently, the locker room never took kindly to all of that, according to Mark Kaboly.
Appearing on 93.7 The Fan yesterday with Joe Starkey, the host for some reason rattled off questions that readers asked Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Gerry Dulac in his latest chat session. One person asked if there was any truth to Mike Tomlin not liking Tyler Boyd. Dulac had nothing to say about Tomlin. Neither did Kaboly, but he did have something to add.
“I don’t know about Mike Tomlin, specifically, not liking him because of what he said”, Kaboly told Starkey. “I just know that the Steelers weren’t interested in him. Somebody within the organization, player-wise, pretty much stood up and said, ‘Nope, we don’t want him here’. It wasn’t the coach, it was a player [who], I think, must have had some pull”.
While Kaboly was clear that he doesn’t know who the specific player was, he seemed confident in this being a fact. And it’s not hard to believe because Tyler Boyd has been an antagonist to the Steelers. In fact, Kaboly said back in May that the Steelers were not interested in him. He did, however, say they had “checked in on him” but didn’t want to pay him.
Back in March, Kaboly did talk about the Steelers having some kind of soft offer on the table for Boyd. However, he also said some within the organization were not all the way on board with them signing him. Did that “some” include members of the locker room, and did Kaboly know that at the time?
Back in 2021, Tyler Boyd accused the Steelers of giving up at the end of a loss to the Bengals. Some players took it in stride, Minkah Fitzpatrick saying it was something that sounds good after a win. But the next year, before they played the Bengals again, Fitzpatrick said that he does think about what Boyd said. “I’m not necessarily dwelling on it but I’m going to remember”.
Around that same time, Boyd went out of his way to portray former-Steelers-turned-Bengals CB Mike Hilton as a victim. “He was just saying how he didn’t feel valued by them”, he said, speaking for his teammate. More recently, late last season, he attacked the Steelers’ culture at the height of George Pickens’ shenanigans.
As if that were not enough, to put the cherry on top, he defended T.J. Houshmandzadeh’s desecration of the Terrible Towel, insisting he “wasn’t a big Steelers fan anyway” despite growing up in Clairton, just outside of Pittsburgh.
To make a long story short, I actually find Kaboly’s claim extremely plausible. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if some Steelers players, including prominent players, didn’t want Tyler Boyd in their locker room. And it never really sounded like he had much interest in being here, anyway. Either way, now they have Mike Williams.
