What an endorsement from the Steelers for Vince Williams.
Strange as this will sound, but as word was circling early Tuesday afternoon through the Rooney Sports Complex that the team had just bolstered the tight end position by trading for Vance McDonald, my mind moved immediately to ... inside linebacker?
Hey, consider it one of the many perks of being your own boss. Everyone else in the building started scurrying to do real reporting while I simply sat and drifted off.
Think of it this way: Mike Tomlin and Kevin Colbert were dissatisfied with what they'd seen from their tight end pool of Jesse James, Xavier Grimble and David Johnson. If they could have crafted a Frankenstein of all three, they'd have been fine. But they couldn't. So, even though they were probably going to be adequate at the position, even though the rest of the offense ranges from strong to superb, they opted to go to the outside.
That sends a powerful message to the tight ends, for sure. But it also sends this message: These guys are damned serious about winning a seventh Super Bowl.
Moreover, at least in this direction, it sent another message: They could have done the same thing with their one perceived weakness on defense. And that, of course, was inside linebacker.
(And yeah, my timeline here points before training camp, when so many of the cornerbacks started falling or faltering.)
Sure, after losing Lawrence Timmons to free agency, the Steelers chased hard after Dont'a Hightower. But once he played them and returned to the Patriots, that was the end of the search. No one else, by all accounts, came close to signing here.
And still now, with the season just a dozen days off, and with management still seeking answers at tight end and corner, inside linebacker's been left in the hands of Williams and, as depth, Tyler Matakevich, both of whom have been terrific all summer.
To know Vinnie is to know the mountain of a chip embedded on his shoulder. But his stance of late seems more focused on moving on from all that.
"I'm ready for this challenge, ready for this opportunity," Williams was telling me at his stall. "I'm not thinking about how it got to this point, everything that's happened before. I'm thinking about what's in front of me, what's in front of all of us. We've got a great defense here. We believe that. And we believe a big reason for that is that we know what we're doing out there. We've got guys who have been together, who've learned together. I can't wait to get going."
• I've no doubt McDonald adds to the tight end depth. I've got even less doubt that James and Grimble were deserving of Tomlin's skepticism, though it definitely wouldn't be prudent to bury either.
But any notion that McDonald, in short order, will somehow leap off the team charter in Charlotte and excel -- or even be close to ready by season's outset -- that's far-fetched. He's got to absorb a brand new playbook, mesh with all the blocking schemes and blitz pickups, gain Ben Roethlisberger's trust on critical third downs ... and I'm only getting started.
I asked Tomlin about expectations for McDonald's adjustment:
