Steelers rookie running back Kaleb Johnson isn’t shying away from comparisons to some established NFL stars.
Johnson ran for 1,537 yards and 21 touchdowns while catching 22 passes for 188 yards and two touchdowns during his final season at Iowa and the third-round pick said in an interview with the team’s website that he thinks his ability to make plays in both areas will make a difference for him in the NFL.
“I feel like I’m a versatile back,” Johnson said. “I can be a Derrick Henry back or I can be a Dalvin Cook back. I feel like that’s what separates me from a lot of backs in the league and in this class that I came into, because, overall, I feel like I’m a fast back and I can be a strong back. Also, catch the ball out of the backfield and be reliable.”
The Steelers would be thrilled if Johnson’s play reminds others of Henry or Cook and they’ll settle for an upgrade over what Najee Harris brought to the offense before he signed with the Chargers as a free agent.
At a time when some of the most powerful people in the country have made “DEI” into a four-letter word, the NFL claims it’s standing firm in its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Recent developments make it fair to ask whether the NFL is truly committed, or whether the NFL is simply trying to thread a needle that is getting smaller all the time.
The latest news came from the league’s cancellation of the 2025 version of the accelerator program, which puts minority candidates in front of owners during the May meetings. The NFL issued a statement last week that attempted to create a “nothing to see here” vibe, explaining that the program was stopped for a year in an effort to make it better next year.
Another view would be that doing it is still better than not doing it, and that it could have been held in its current form in 2025 as usual and changes could still be made for 2026.
Jarrett Bell of USA Today has taken a closer look at the league’s mixed signals. On a subject where the league tries to say all the right things, the actions aren’t completely meshing with the words.
“I realize that people are going to look at [the cancellation of the 2025 accelerator program] and say, ‘These people are backing off,’” Steelers owner Art Rooney II told Bell. “That’s not going to happen. There’s nothing I can really do about that perception, except to say that we’re still not satisfied with where we are, and we recognize that we still have work to do.”
Both the perception and the reality when it comes to the league’s hiring practices for key positions like coach and General Manager have been equally bad over the years. Not long before former Dolphins coach Brian Flores put his career on the line by filing a landmark racial discrimination case against the NFL and multiple teams, NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent provided a damning admission that was highlighted in Flores’s civil complaint.
“There is a double standard, and we’ve seen that,” Vincent said. “And you talk about the appetite for what’s acceptable. Let’s just go back to . . . Coach [Tony] Dungy was let go in Tampa Bay after a winning season. . . Coach [Steve] Wilks, just a few years prior, was let go after one year . . . Coach [Jim] Caldwell was fired after a winning season in Detroit . . . It is part of the larger challenges that we have. But when you just look over time, it’s over-indexing for men of color. These men have been fired after a winning season. How do you explain that? There is a double standard. I don’t think that that is something that we should shy away from. But that is all part of some of the things that we need to fix in the system. We want to hold everyone to why does one, let’s say, get the benefit of the doubt to be able to build or take bumps and bruises in this process of getting a franchise turned around when others are not afforded that latitude? . . . [W]e’ve seen that in history at the [professional] level.”
Since Flores filed his lawsuit in 2022, the NFL has been trying to change its ways. The problem, as of 2025, is that a full-throated commitment to DEI can result in an executive order at worst — and a rambling, nonsensical, all-caps social media assault at best.
Speaking of rambling and nonsensical, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones provided some quotes to Bell regarding the impact of the political assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I don’t want to . . . I think it just makes us all aware,” Jones told Bell. “The emphasis the president puts on it just makes us all aware and thinking about it.”
What’s there to think about? Whether to remain committed to diversity? Or whether to find a way to tiptoe through a field full of mines planted by those who would like to 86 DEI?
“I know you’re saying, ‘Was this a reaction to that? And the timing of it?’” Jones told Bell regarding the cancellation of the accelerator program for 2025. “I don’t believe and have seen nothing from talking to anybody, that this is a reaction to that. I think you’d be naïve if you didn’t think the Supreme Court decisions have impacted decisions all over the country. The issue of technically, how and what you’re doing, I think that’s a lot more influenced than anything our president is talking about. . . . You see what I’m saying? The overall direction the Supreme Court took, that whole area would be a bigger impact.”
Jones is referring to the Supreme Court’s ruling from 2023 limiting race-conscious admissions practices for colleges and universities. Which is one of the unsurprising outcomes of a Supreme Court that has been stacked with the kind of conservative, business-friendly justices to whom someone like Jones would gift a Super Bowl ring and then act like it’s not part of a broader effort to ensure that the Supreme Court’s body of work will be favorable to the interests of America’s oligarchs.
The challenge for the NFL is to create a P.R. strategy that pushes the idea that they’re trying to increase and promote diversity, while also discreetly waging legal battles aimed at minimizing liability. It’s one of the reasons why the league always tries to pull any civil action against it from the true independence of the court system and into the secret, rigged, kangaroo court of arbitration, where the Commissioner is the one who hands out (and sometimes wears) the black robe.
Here’s the NFL’s apparent DEI playbook: Say one thing, do another. And then, when the thing you do gets noticed and criticized, say whatever you have to say to explain it all away.
That approach works, until it doesn’t. With the top of the executive branch currently going scorched earth on DEI, the tentpoles of the NFL’s P.R. effort are being quietly knocked down.
Beyond the decision to abandon the accelerator in 2025 under the guise of making it better for 2026, the NFL didn’t conduct during the 2025 annual meeting (as Bell notes) a media briefing from the diversity committee, which Rooney chairs.
The reason for that seems obvious. Anything the NFL would have said during the briefing to pat itself on the back when it comes to DEI efforts could (and quite possibly would) have been used against it, if/when the Commander-in-Tweet had happened to notice it while scrolling through his phone from the golden throne with a hole in the middle of the seat.
The clock keeps ticking on the potential if not inevitable decision of quarterback Aaron Rodgers to join forces with the Steelers.
And the clock apparently will be striking Threat Level Midnight soon.
Appearing with our friends on 93.7 The Fan’s The PM Team, Rodgers biographer Ian O’Connor expressed confidence that Rodgers will be a Steeler by the end of the month.
“I just think verbally, behind the scenes, not that he guaranteed it, but he’s told [the Steelers], ‘Listen, I’m gonna play for you. I just don’t want to go there and then miss part of mandatory minicamp because of my personal issues. I’m pretty sure they’re gonna be solved by the end of May, at least in my satisfaction where I can give you my all.’ So that’s where I think he is,” O’Connor said, via SteelersDepot.com.
O’Connor presumably was referring to the offseason program generally, not mandatory minicamp specifically. The 2025 mandatory session caps the offseason program in June.
This explanation from O’Connor meshes with something we recently explained. It’s possible, if not likely, that Rodgers picked the lesser of two distractions by not signing with the Steelers versus signing and being absent for most if not all of the first two phases of the offseason program, which he doesn’t like anyway.
Rodgers, in his only public comments this offseason, cited personal issues relating to a member of his inner circle as the main reason for his delay in picking a new team. O’Connor (who interviewed 250 people for his 2024 book) seems to know what the personal issues are, but he prudently opted not to disclose them.
“The sense I got was, I think I have a pretty good sense of what it is, and I don’t think it’s something that would prevent him from playing football,” O’Connor said.
O’Connor otherwise believes Pittsburgh is the “perfect place” for Rodgers to end his career.
“He knows it was an embarrassment in New York largely, and he’s the face of that embarrassment,” O’Connor said. “Whether that’s fair or not, that’s the case. It may be me as an optimist, but I think this is gonna work out. Do I think the Steelers will win the Super Bowl next year? No. But if you told me 11-6 with at least one playoff victory . . . I think that’s realistic.”
It definitely is. The Steelers have not had high-end quarterback play for several years. Rodgers will instantly make them much better at the most important position on the field.
Rodgers doesn’t need to get back to the Super Bowl for the second time to flush the stench of his tenure with the Jets. While the Week 1 2023 Achilles tendon tear was a fluke, last year’s 5-12 record was Rodgers’s worst season as a full-time starter.
Few Hall of Famers walk into the sunset with a Super Bowl trophy under their arm. For Rodgers, it’s all about authoring a final chapter that makes Act II look like an aberration, not a limp to the finish line.
Either way, his offseason of mostly silence seems to be moving toward its finish line. Waiting until after the schedule came out seemed to help the Steelers have fewer standalone games. With OTAs starting in only eight days, there’s a very good chance that, by next Sunday, the Steelers will be having a press conference.
Social media was buzzing on Saturday morning with various videos of what appeared to be an incident involving former NFL receiver Antonio Brown. Near the end of one of the videos, a pair of gunshots could be heard.
Via Devon Cetoute of the Miami Herald, Brown explained that he was “was jumped by multiple individuals who tried to steal my jewelry and cause physical harm to me.” Brown added that, after being briefly detained by police, he was released after the officers “received my side of the story.”
It happened at a boxing event in a Miami warehouse, featuring someone named Adin Ross. (If I was 40 years younger, I’d probably know who that is. If I was 20 years younger, I’d take the time to look it up.)
The videos that surfaced seemed to show Brown being attacked and Brown running through a crowd. In a livestream conducted by Ross, Brown said, “I got CTE, I blacked out. I ain’t know what happened.”
Police arrived after they received an alert that shots had been fired.
No arrests were made. Brown said he’ll explore “pressing charges on the individuals that jumped me.”
Brown last played in the NFL in 2021, after a career that included many spectacular seasons with the Steelers, failed stints with the Raiders and Patriots, and a Super Bowl win in Tampa Bay.
For the first time ever, an NFL team will play a pair of road games in two different European cities. It’s a sign of things to come.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the Vikings’ Week 4 game against the Steelers in Dublin followed by their Week 5 game against the Browns in London is trial run for the expanded use of multiple teams that will play in multiple European cities in consecutive weeks.
As soon as next year, there could be two or three teams that swap two traditional road games for a pair of neutral-site games in London and/or Dublin and/or Germany and/or Spain and/or elsewhere in Europe. (Sign me up for Bruges.)
In 2026, those teams would likely come from the AFC, which will have nine road games in the current 17-game eight/nine home/away rotation.
Eventually, look for four franchises to serve as the “road” team in (math is hard) eight European games.
It’s all part of the NFL’s current plan to expand the number of international games to 16 per year. Which will be the approach unless and until the NFL drops a franchise or two (or four) in Europe.
