You gotta admire players' abilities to turn on and off the hyper-competitive nature they have.
Steelers second-year players Vince Williams and Le'Veon Bell went after each other after a particularly combative encounter during the team's backs-on-'backers drill Friday night. It extended past the whistle and off the area of play, and eventually, Williams ended up on top of Bell. The two grabbing and punched at each other until LeGarrette Blount (who wasn't participating in practice) threw a forearm at Williams on the ground.
Steelers defensive assistant coach Joey Porter got involved at that point, and Blount eventually left the melee, saying he'd get Williams the next day.
That next day came, and there were no reports of Blount and Williams getting into it. Williams even told Post Gazette reporter Ray Fittipaldo he and Bell have ironed out their differences.
Or at the very least, don't care enough about them to let them fester.
"Me and Le'Veon are cool," Williams told Fittipaldo. "We're just competitors going after it. Things like that happen. It's not like me and him don't like each other or have a beef. When you get in a heated drill like that, he wants to win and I want to win. Things like that happen."
The incident shouldn't be seen as a surprise. It's encouraging, in fact. This is a defense that needs to get tougher. Porter wasn't brought in as a special assistant for the sake of strategy alone. His intensity, his passion, these traits will rub off on people, and clearly, based on the first week of camp, it's taking root.
Not that Williams ever needed a push. He was oftentimes the one celebrating the most boisterously after a play was made last season. The rookie got on the field after a season-ending injury to Larry Foote. While he didn't perform at a high level, we noted back then his passion was a breath of fresh air on a defense that looked otherwise stoic and even uninterested at times.
As for Bell, a huge portion of the offense will go through him this year as a runner and a receiver. The harder he fights, the more he can show his teammates he's putting in the work and he has the will to succeed.
It's good both players are cool with each other. But taking those kinds of incidents - both without penalty and injury - for the sake of building to the moment both can tell the other there are no hard feelings, they just want to win will have a lasting effect on the entire team.