Tim Benz: Najee Harris' revelation about his foot is another example of NFL injury 'paranoia' backfiring for Steelers

When medical issues crop up about his players, Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin frequently tells us that he’s not a doctor.

But, occasionally, he will play one on TV.

Well, when he thinks it benefits the team, anyway.

Take, for example, halftime of Sunday afternoon’s preseason win over the Detroit Lions. That’s when when he told CBS sideline reporter Evan Washburn that injured starters Diontae Johnson (shoulder) and T.J. Watt (knee) wouldn’t return to action in the second half, but they likely would have been able to do so if it was a regular season game.

Steelers fans can exhale a little bit.

Evan Washburn reports he talked with Mike Tomlin, who said "if this is a regular season game, we may see them back in this game. There's no long term concern at the moment for T.J. Watt or Diontae Johnson."

— Jenna Harner (@JennaHarner11) August 28, 2022

I’m sure most Steelers fans happily rubber-stamped that diagnosis as good news until, perhaps, postgame interviews.

It was at that point when running back Najee Harris suddenly revealed that the nagging foot injury that had kept him sidelined for most of training camp was actually what he called a “Lisfranc sprain.”

Not just the result of “being stepped on” as fans and media had been led to believe.

“Just to give everybody an update, I never did just get my foot stepped on. I had a sprained Lisfranc. That’s why I was out for the majority of the camp,” Harris said.

Najee Harris said it was good to shake off the rust pic.twitter.com/lUEaJ0hVsp

— Chris Adamski (@C_AdamskiTrib) August 28, 2022

According to Harris, it’s a four- to six-week injury, and he’s about four to five weeks removed from suffering it on Aug. 1.

“Not a lot of significant news regarding health-related things. Najee [Harris] wasn’t able to finish; somebody stepped on his foot, but it shouldn’t be a major deal,” Tomlin said after that practice.

When a reporter followed up a few minutes later seeking more information, Tomlin abruptly replied, “Somebody stepped on him.”

In other words, “That’s all I’m telling you. Stop asking me about it.”

To be fair, Tomlin likely didn’t have Harris’ Lisfranc diagnosis an hour after it happened on the field. He hadn’t even been fully evaluated or even left the practice field entirely.

Related:

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But from that point forward, Harris was always tucked under the blanket of being “day to day” in terms of his health status, as was just about any other Steeler who was injured. But certainly, no other details were offered up, and clearly, based on Harris’ response, information was willingly withheld from the media.

The Steelers are certainly allowed to do that. There is no league-mandated injury report in the preseason.

But why the espionage? Why the cloak-and-dagger? If you are going to bother discussing the injuries at all, why the word games and misdirection if you are a month away from a game that matters?

That’s why the weekly exercise of releasing team-by-team NFL injury reports is so silly. I get it. It’s done to keep fans “informed” for fantasy league and gambling purposes. But if Tomlin is hoodwinking us in August before preseason games, what’s he going to be like in September when the Steelers open up against the Bengals, Patriots and Browns?

Tomlin memorably lived in a very gray area of how forthcoming he was about injuries with Le’Veon Bell before the 2016 AFC Championship Game loss in New England. At least then, if he was obfuscating, there was a tactical reason for it.

But, now, we’re talking about the preseason. What was to be gained from keeping Harris’ diagnosis a secret? To tamp down questions about needing to go out and find a veteran backup running back? I mean, those of us in the media kept asking those questions anyway, and we would have even if Harris was totally healthy because it’s been an obvious question about the Steelers depth chart for months.

Tomlin’s reaction to this foot issue with Harris was nothing more than paranoia for paranoia’s sake.

Injury reporting is always a point of tension between media members and the coaches we cover. Maybe the biggest one.

Privacy issues and competitive advantage concerns are touchy subjects for them, and failing to receive honest, forthcoming responses to legitimate questions is touchy for us.

Part of me wishes that all teams and leagues institute a “won’t tell, don’t ask” policy. Ditch the stupid injury report rules, adhere to strict zero information policies from the teams on injuries unless the team offers it up, and just let the athletes tell us as much or as little as they want on their own — without team mandates preventing them from talking.

In other words, remove the coaches as the middlemen in this scenario.

Hey, I’d rather get no information than be intentionally misled — and, by extension, misleading the public. If the players want to do that themselves, so be it. It’s their bodies. It’s their careers. It should be their decision to say as much or as little as they want about why an injury may be impacting their play or why they may want to hide one from an upcoming opponent.

Look at Harris, for instance. There has to be a reason why he suddenly felt compelled to share his Lisfranc condition. Based on his own harsh self-evaluation of his “rusty” play Sunday, perhaps he was offering up a reason to fans why he may be behind where they expect him to be.

Or, maybe he was taking heat from trolls on social media, questioning him as to why it was taking a month for him to come back from just being “stepped on” in practice.

But teams always want to control the message. So they’ll keep squeezing the sand so tight that it eventually slips through their fingers, which essentially is what happened to Tomlin and the Steelers Sunday.

So take Tomlin’s update on Watt and Johnson with a large grain of salt. Or an entire industrial-sized canister of Morton’s. And remember when Tomlin said that they could’ve come back and played, that doesn’t mean they aren’t hurt. It just means Johnson and Watt may have been able to tough it out. There’s a difference.

And that explanation Tomlin gave Washburn also fails to answer one other question: Why was the reigning Defensive Player of the Year out there that deep into the second quarter of the last preseason game anyway?

But that’s a column for another day. And if Watt is out for any extended period of time, trust me, I’ll write it.