Myles Garrett and the Browns have taken plenty of heat the last few days for their role in Thursday’s fourth-quarter brawl against the Steelers in Cleveland. And the team, especially Garrett, wasted no time acknowledging their shortcomings.
Now, five days after the meleé, Pittsburgh is taking responsibility for its own mistakes. Well, kind of.
“It was ugly. It was ugly for the game of football,” Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin said Tuesday, per ESPN’s Brooke Pryor. “I think all of us that are involved in the game, particularly at this level, want to safeguard and protect the game, its integrity. And in that instance, it was compromised, obviously, with an unfortunate incident. None of us want those incidents to transpire. It did. We were a part of it. We accept responsibility for our actions within it.”
The Steelers weren’t entirely innocent in Thursday’s ordeal. Sure, center Maurkice Pouncey was ejected for attempting to defend quarterback Mason Rudolph, but the Pittsburgh quarterback got pretty scrappy with Garrett before being bashed over the head with his own helmet. Some even have speculated Rudolph may have instigated the initial scuffle that led to the fight in the end zone.
But after all that’s transpired, Tomlin still said there’s “nothing to learn” from the brawl.
“… I don’t know that we did anything to make it happen in the first place,” Tomlin said. “That’s why I said we didn’t have anything to learn from it.”
(We’d beg to differ.)
The two squads will meet again in Week 13 when the Browns visit the Steelers on Dec. 1. That one should be a doozy.
