The injury to Russell Wilson at the start of training camp brings attention to Mike Tomlin's habit of being lax with injury updates. While it's okay to keep some injury details private during the season, this incident occurred on the first day of training camp, and Mike Tomlin turned a minor issue into a major one.
During the regular season, the NFL enforces strict rules on reporting injuries and imposes severe penalties on teams that break them. However, training camps are not subject to the same regulations. With nearly six weeks until the season starts, players have time to recover. Since they are not actively playing games during this time, there's no urgent need for secrecy. Mike Tomlin has never gotten that memo.
Tomlin causes unneeded speculation over Russell Wilson
At Thursday's press conference, Mike Tomlin addressed the media, stating that Russell Wilson had woken up with tightness in his calf, and coaches decided not to allow him to practice to prevent a minor injury from becoming a major injury. That seemed suspicious, considering the Steelers had not practiced outside of some conditioning tests.
However, the media runs with it, and then we get a million stories online: Wilson out, Fields takes first-team snaps, or Wilson needs to be careful, or he could lose his starting job to Fields. Just Google them, and you will find a plethora of articles.
On Friday, after Wilson had missed another day of practice, writers published more stories online about Wilson losing his starting position. It was then that the truth about Wilson's injury came out.
Contrary to earlier reports, he did not randomly wake up with calf pain; instead, he had tweaked his calf during the conditioning test the Steelers conducted on Wednesday. It would have been better if Tomlin had mentioned on Thursday that Wilson had tweaked his calf during the conditioning test and that he is deliberately holding him out of practice for a day or two to ensure it heals properly.
However, Tomlin never takes the simple, direct approach to first stringers; just look at how he approached Cordarrelle Patterson's hamstring injury, who will not be a regular starter. To paraphrase Tomlin's report on Petterson, he said he pulled his hamstring in a workout down south and will be day to day going forward. Perhaps not everything we needed to know, but it was enough at any rate.
Remember that Tomlin has a history of distorting injuries and has gotten in trouble. Remember his 2019 fine of $25,000 and a team fine of $75,000 for failing to report an injury to Ben Roethlisberger. In 2022, Mike Tomlin overplayed a foot injury in training camp to Najee Harris.
People wondered and criticized Najee for a seemingly poor performance. Partway through the 2022 season, Harris later revealed his foot injury was more severe than Tomlin led us to believe, and he played part of the season with a steel plate in his shoe.
Occasionally, it is necessary to be discreet in reporting injuries while adhering to NFL rules. In this case, Tomlin's actions exacerbated a problem by not providing the information needed, leading to wild media speculation of Wilson losing his starting job. One of the most durable quarterbacks in NFL history sustaining an injury in training camp is problematic enough; we should not have media needing to speculate on happenings at Steelers training camp.
What we need, and what the audience deserves, is factual information reported from St. Vincent College. Tomlin Criticizes the media for over-analysis of the mundane but typically tends to be the cause of it sometimes.
