{"id":786676,"date":"2026-03-02T13:14:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T13:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/786676\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T13:14:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T13:14:16","slug":"this-is-messed-up-former-steelers-players-agree-failing-report-card-for-locker-room-well-deserved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/786676\/","title":{"rendered":"‘This Is Messed Up’: Former Steelers Players Agree Failing Report Card For Locker Room Well Deserved"},"content":{"rendered":"

As much as Steelers players loved playing for the team\u2014and Mike Tomlin\u2014the NFLPA report card shows they put up with a lot<\/a>. Many players come to Pittsburgh with an understanding that to play for the Steelers \u201cmeans something\u201d. Not only do they have a historical legacy, they have, up until recently, had stability and consistency.<\/p>\n

But that also meant putting up with facilities that fall bar behind the standards of the rest of the NFL. And sometimes it wasn\u2019t until after the fact that you might have really understood that. It\u2019s a subject former Steelers Joe Haden and James Harrison addressed on the Deebo & Joe podcast<\/a> about the NFLPA report card.<\/p>\n

The Steelers earned an F- grade on the NFLPA report card<\/a> for their locker rooms. Unsurprisingly, that ranked last in the league\u2014it\u2019s hard to do worse than F-. While merely the grades leaked, Joe Haden\u2019s comments indicate the players received more information, akin to what the union released publicly in previous years but are no longer allowed to<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The one thing that\u2019s just glowing here is that the locker room, F-minus for sure. And when they state facts like five bathrooms, when we think about it, like, that\u2019s just the way it was\u2014that\u2019s not okay. It could be 100 people in that joint at one time. \u2026 Then with the showers, it\u2019s not a lot of them joints in there, too. And in the locker room, when you walk in there, it\u2019s old. It\u2019s wood. It got your little name on the junk. But when we look at it back in the day coming from [Cleveland], I was like, \u2018Culture. This is what it is\u2019. But when you do look at it, it\u2019s like, \u2018Nah, this is messed up\u2019. We need to have bathrooms available.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So, it\u2019s not just the lockers, for example, that earned the Steelers such bad grade on the report card. It\u2019s about the entire locker room facility, including, apparently, a very limited number of toilets. James Harrison talked about how it didn\u2019t even occur to him at the time, but that it\u2019s obvious. He said he would go into the bathroom and count the feet under the stalls. If all were occupied, he ran upstairs in hopes of hitting another bathroom, should it be unoccupied.<\/p>\n

While a lot of NFL owners\u2014including the Steelers\u2019\u2014don\u2019t like the NFLPA report cards, the reality is a lot of fans couldn\u2019t care less. At the end of the day, we are talking about mostly millionaires, yes. But those millionaires are also working for billionaires, to the scale is relative.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s also relative to other teams, and there is increasing movement around the NFL. When Najee Harris left the Steelers last year, he seemed shocked by the Chargers\u2019 facilities<\/a>. Now, there are spatial and contractual limitations right now on what the team can actually do about some of the bigger criticisms on the report. And they have addressed some, including the playing surface, which is a pretty important one. But if years of report cards haven\u2019t had a bigger impact for the Steelers, they probably won\u2019t any time soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As much as Steelers players loved playing for the team\u2014and Mike Tomlin\u2014the NFLPA report card shows they put…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2055],"tags":[83800,7,2710,30098,6,520,57,2360,426,691],"class_list":["post-786676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-pittsburgh-steelers","tag-deebo-and-joe","tag-football","tag-james-harrison","tag-joe-haden","tag-nfl","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-steelers","tag-pittsburghsteelers","tag-steelers","tag-trending"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116159765762182759","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}