As the Steelers prepare to host a team that has one of the league’s most notorious defensive players, it’s worth pointing out that one of the most notorious defensive plays of the year ultimately cost less than a Chevy Spark.
Despite a splash (and ultimately erroneous) report from ESPN on Thursday that Steelers safety Mike Mitchell had been fined $48,620 for diving at the knees of Chiefs quarterback Alex Smith after the ball was away, the league fined Mitchell only $9,115 for a move that seemed to be aimed at doing only one thing -- injuring Smith.
The fine that cost more than a Chevy Tahoe came from Mitchell’s latest illegal helmet-to-helmet hit on a defenseless receiver.
And so the end result is that, once again, the NFL takes potentially dangerous hits to the head far more seriously than potentially dangerous hits to the knee. Which makes sense at one level, because Congress won’t hold hearings and parents won’t hold their kids out of football over fears of a potentially torn ACL.
Still, if the league wants to ensure that the only position where demand outpaces supply will be properly filled, the league needs to be far more vigilant when it’s obvious, as it was here, that a defensive player was trying to inflict a serious knee injury upon a quarterback.
Understandably, the Steelers insisted that Mitchell did nothing wrong. They likely won’t say that if the exact same scenario unfolds today, with Vontaze Burfict diving at Ben Roethlisberger’s knees after the ball was clearly away.