The Pittsburgh Steelers have long had a coaching staff that excels at halftime adjustments. Dating back to the days of Dick LeBeau, Mike Munchak, and many other skilled coordinators and position coaches, the Steelers have thrived in the second halves of games.
Even the 2024 group, for whatever you want to say about them, was much better in the second half than the first. Halftime adjustments, or even sideline adjustments, are one of the most important aspects of coaching. You can only game plan for so much, and at some point, you have to evolve on the fly to match the wrinkles of opposing teams.
Ben Roethlisberger talked at length during his Footbahlin podcast about a growing trend toward the end of his career that I am sure is ubiquitous now in the Steelers’ locker room, and all locker rooms in the NFL, for that matter. That is, of course, the usage of cell phones at halftime in NFL locker rooms. Instead of being locked into what the coaches were saying or reviewing the tape to try to correct issues from the first half, Roethlisberger noticed a lot of players checking their social media or text messages to see what people had to say about their play.
This is going to be a ‘Get off my lawn!’ type of post about addiction to cell phones and social media in this day and age. And who am I to talk as a 30-year-old blogger who spends most of my working days scrolling X and YouTube? But that is also central to the core responsibilities of my job description, while it clearly isn’t for NFL players in the middle of a game.
Below is what Roethlisberger had to say.
“There was a trend my last couple years of playing that kind of came in the league that, I can’t remember when — it could have been five, six years as I was ending — but the trend got progressively worse,” Roethlisberger said. “Guys would come in at halftime and go right to their locker and grab their phones and be looking at social media, looking at things like that…Not everybody, but it got progressively more and more.”
He then described how each position group had its own area of the locker room to meet with position coaches during halftime before the coordinators and the head coach addressed the team as a whole.
“The linemen would always be together. You never saw those guys on phones,” Roethlisberger said. “But you’d see other guys instead of being with their group, they were in their locker looking at their phones.”
Mike Tomlin spoke about his efforts to connect and get messages through to the new generation of athletes during HBO’s Hard Knocks. He spoke about the power of positivity and showing players images and videos of themselves making big plays. It’s kind of a rudimentary attempt at communicating with the younger generation, but at least an effort is being made.
Many players now come out of college with cash in the bank because of NIL deals, and they practically grew up online, with smartphones, social media, and the internet a big part of their upbringing. It’s an inescapable part of the culture at this point, but it does seem a bit odd that there are no team rules regarding this type of behavior at halftime.
That being said, and Roethlisberger acknowledges it himself, he is no longer in the locker room. Maybe rules have changed since he left, but he made it sound relatively unchecked over the final five or six years of his career.
Surely nobody has forgotten about the infamous Antonio Brown locker room live stream following their playoff win over the Kansas City Chiefs. Coincidentally (or not), that was the Steelers’ final playoff win nearly a decade ago.
“To me, that would always drive me nuts,” Roethlisberger said of the cell phone trend. “You’re not coming in thinking about what you did in the first half. You’re coming in thinking about what are people either saying about me on social media…If you’re coming in checking because you’ve got a sick someone at home, or you’ve got maybe a wife that’s pregnant, things like that, maybe. But this would happen way too often for those kinds of things to happen. I just think that sometimes that can be part of a mentality.”
Roethlisberger asserts that this trend has perhaps hindered the team’s ability to make effective adjustments at halftime.
“You gotta have a singular focus when you’re on the field. And what can I do for the second half? What did I do good and bad in the first half, and then what do we do to improve in the second half? That’s what halftime adjustments are for,” Roethlisberger said. “When I was playing, we used to say we have the best coaches at halftime adjustments and even sideline adjustments.”
He specifically mentioned that he isn’t taking anything away from the current team as he is not in the locker room to see those dynamics. But his thoughts are pretty interesting when you zoom out and look at the larger trend of player engagement (or lack thereof) in the locker room at halftime, which I am sure is not an issue that’s isolated to the Steelers.
Should teams implement stricter rules on halftime distractions, or is this just an unavoidable reality of the modern era?
