Is Cam Hayward giving in to the Steelers?

Has Mike Tomlin lost his mind in terms of preseason participation?

Who will actually suit up in Charlotte Thursday

night? I have been surprised by a lot of different things today. And we're going to be talking

about some of those different things with Chris Halleck when he joins us in the moment.

But I do feel compelled to point out before any of that that football is not exactly

the type of sport where you can just show up and be ready for an NFL game.

And I'm going to give you a really, I think, healthy reminder of why that is and what that

looks like a couple of years ago in Cincinnati. Remember this now? Yeah, I'm triggering it already,

right? The Bengals, they rested everybody through the preseason. They didn't do anything. It was

bubble wrap galore.

The Steelers show up at Paycourt Stadium and they're just, they're ready to just,

they're ready to eat everybody alive. And guess what they did in the first half of that game? They ate everybody alive, especially in the first half. Now, T.J. ended up getting hurt in that first half, but they were really, really, really ready to play.

And the Bengals weren't.

So lessons get learned, lessons get taught.

New lessons emerge.

A couple nights ago, the Bengals were playing a preseason game and for some insane reason they had joe burrow out there behind the world's worst offensive line and they are that if you haven't seen this footage and burrow's getting chased all over ohio in this game.

And finally they're like, whoa, whoa, stop this, stop this, get him out of there.

Have they learned something from it?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe they have, maybe they haven't.

...