Mike Tomlin says the team was given special permission from league and NFLPA to stick to their schedule and practice Monday — means they didn't have to have four days off in a row for the bye, as mandated in CBA.
— Brooke Pryor (@bepryor) October 6, 2020
No thanks to the coronavirus outbreak in Tennessee, Pittsburgh’s Week 4 and Week 5 schedule was a little off.
Under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, teams normally have four consecutive days off heading into a bye week. However, practice was already underway on Thursday when news of the Steelers-Titans postponement came down.
The Steelers wanted to return to work Monday as to not disrupt preparations for the Philadelphia Eagles, but that would mean only three days off. So, to get back to practice yesterday, Tomlin had to seek permission from the NFL and the NFL players association.
“We always work on Mondays coming out of byes, but very rarely do we work on Thursday,” Tomlin said Tuesday during his weekly press conference. “The issue for us last week was, we didn’t know that we had a bye until we were at work on Thursday. So the [players association] and the league were considerate of those special circumstances, and they allowed us to stick to our schedule.”
The Steelers bye week was certainly unanticipated but Tomlin said it was productive nonetheless.
“It was a really productive [bye week], largely because we didn’t know it was a bye week,” Tomlin said in his weekly press conference. “We got a lot of good schematic work done at the top of the week in preparation for what we thought would be the Tennessee Titans game. We were able to put some of that preparation away and file it for later.”
Tomlin said they’ll see exactly how productive it was when the time comes to play the Titans on Oct. 25.
An advantage to the unexpected bye week was to be able to watch the competition and, particularly, their upcoming opponent in the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles defeated the San Francisco 49ers, 25-20, on Sunday. At 1-2-1, Philadelphia is first in the NFC East.
“It was an opportunity for us to pause, and take a global perspective on competition, and we were able to do that,” Tomlin said.
Otherwise, as Tomlin likes to say, they were able to take care of “normal bumps and bruises associated with play.”
Diontae Johnson is good to go on Sunday, but the status of fullback Derek Watt and safety Marcus Allen is still up in the air.
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