Steelers declare ping-pong and pool off-limits to younger players

When your team goes 0-2 for the first time since 2002 you start looking around your house for reasons. Is there a lack of sweat in the weight room, too much shuteye in the film room or discord in the locker room?

Well around the Pittsburgh Steelers compound, it's apparently because players are having too much fun in the rec room.

After dissecting game film and looking over the roster, the Steelers have discovered the reason for their dismal 0-2 start — and they are blaming it on the kids playing too much ping-pong and pool.

As reported Thursday afternoon by KDKA-TV’s Jory Rand, Steelers veterans have decided to ban anyone with less than four years of pro experience from picking up a paddle or a cue stick at the team’s South Side training facility during “business hours.” According to 12th-year NFL safety Ryan Clark, this was decided in a meeting of the Steelers’ more tenured players Wednesday and the restrictions were prominently posted on the wall.

Rand posted this on Twitter:

I asked Ryan Clark if the signs were new. "Did you see them there yesterday?" He would only add it was their meeting not a public meeting.
— Jory Rand (@JoryRand) September 19, 2013

Isaac Redman, who is in his 4th season, thus barely qualifying him to play, was happy to tell me he enjoyed a game of pool this morning.
— Jory Rand (@JoryRand) September 19, 2013

Later, Rand reported, those signs were taken down. But the message still permeates throughout the locker room.

"Young guys can't play pool, ping pong or shuffleboard. Sucks to be a young guy, I guess," Redman said later. "We need to win a football game here before guys are coming in worrying about who's first on the pool table. So that eliminates that."

Instead of a public spanking in front of the media, couldn't the Steelers’ veterans just have easily informed their younger teammates in private? It sounds like bad parenting.