A little backstory for those who may have missed it, as it is playoff time in NFL, the media is in overdrive in the run-up to this year's Superbowl, and one of the main stories that dominated headlines and discussion shows was Odell Beckham Jnr. and the NY Giants receiver core going on a boat party a week before a playoff game.
That may not sound like a huge deal, but they then lost that playoff game, so it became a huge deal. With this in mind, NFL coaches have been hammering home the necessity to avoid these type of distractions by keeping a low profile on social media, and we know this because it is exactly what Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin told his players after their beat the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night.
But how do we know what he said to the players in the changing room?
Because Antonio Brown, the team's biggest star player, live streamed his coach's post-game speech on Facebook Live, which featured #84 pulling some faces, and Mike Tomlin referring to the Patriots, their opponents in the conference championship game next week, as 'assholes'.
The clip went viral, such a beautiful irony in a player live streaming a speech where he coach is begging him and his colleagues to be careful on social media, to thousands of fans.
So naturally, it was dissected and analysed, and the fact that Tomlin referred to the Pats as assholes was presented to Bill Belichick in the hopes that he would respond and the drama would kick-off ahead of next weekend's clash, and he completely shut it down with the ultimate 'I couldn't give a shit' response:
As you know I’m not on Snap Face and all those. I’m not too worried what they put on Instant Chat. I don't really get those.
On @WEEI, Belichick asked about Tomlin's a-hole comment: "As you know I'm not on Snapface and all that so I don't really get those."
— Phil Perry (@PhilAPerry) January 16, 2017
Spoken like a man who has social media activity invisibly low on his list of priorities.
'Snapface', not quite Snapchat, not quite Facebook, but just enough to show that you have a basic knowledge of their existence, but absolutely no further context. 'Instachat' is a better effort, but we can only assume he refers to every format of video game as 'Nintendo'.
