The Pittsburgh Steelers will host the Buffalo Bills for joint practice sessions to close out training camp in advance of the teams’ first preseason game Aug, 17.
The NFL listed the previously unannounced venture Monday in a release previewing the opening of camps leaguewide. The Aug. 15 joint practice will be at Acrisure Stadium, is scheduled to run from 2-4 p.m. and is not open to the public. The final open practice is the day prior at Saint Vincent, after which the Steelers will break camp.
The most recent time the Steelers held joint practices with another team was 2016 when the Detroit Lions came to Saint Vincent for a pair of workouts. The Steelers and Bills also had joint practices at Saint Vincent in 2014. Those are the lone instances under coach Mike Tomlin that the Steelers have practiced with another team.
Tempers flared at times between players during those workouts, but that is not atypical. Former Steelers receiver Antonio Brown almost got ejected from the practice by a league official who was brought in for the session.
“This is their practice. He will do it here and get away with it,” field judge Terry Brown said that day. “But if he thinks he can do that and get away with it in a game, he’s got another thing coming. I’m still going to report it to the league.”
Two years earlier, the proverbial temperature was turned down a notch when the Steelers and Bills practiced together.
“We’re here to prove that teams are capable of coming together and doing it in a productive and professional manner,” Tomlin said after the Aug. 13, 2014, practice at Saint Vincent, “and I compliment both teams for how they did it today.”
The day before that practice, the Dallas Cowboys and then-Oakland Raiders had what was described as “a full-scale brawl” during a joint practice.
Tomlin and Buffalo coach Sean McDermott are longtime friends, a factor that likely contributed to the agreement to practice together and could help keep it civil on the field.
Including the Steelers’ most recent game — a Jan. 15 wild-card postseason meeting in Orchard Park, N.Y. — the Steelers and Bills have played once each of the past five seasons. They also met during last year’s preseason.
Each summer, several NFL teams join with other franchises for joint practices. Some organizations gravitate to the format more than others. The Los Angeles Rams, for instance, have four joint practices scheduled for next month: two with the Los Angeles Chargers and one each with the Cowboys and Houston Texans. When Lions coach Dan Campbell earlier this spring made public that the Lions and New York Giants were going to have joint practices ahead of their preseason game, he expressed regret that the team could not find another partner.
The group of unwilling matches would seem to include the Steelers, who close out their preseason with an Aug. 24 game at Detroit.
The Steelers a few decades ago annually practiced/scrimmaged with the then-Washington Redskins. In the league at large, joint practices tend to ebb and flow in popularity.
Last August during an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, Steelers general manager Omar Khan said the team every spring has “conversations” with potential practice partners “as soon as the preseason schedules come out.”
“We always entertain a couple of them,” Khan told McAfee. “Just logistically, for several reasons maybe, it just hasn’t worked out.
“There’s no real specific reason. … For us it’s just kind of worked out coming to camp. We have a pretty good camp. We like the physicality of it. If (a joint practice) happens, it happens.”
