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Expletive-Laden Speech By Steelers' Coach Streamed On Facebook Live

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And I'm David Greene. And, Steve, I do not have to tell you how excited I was the other night when my Pittsburgh Steelers hung on to beat the Kansas City Chiefs, and it is on to the AFC Championship Game against England.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

No, you actually don't.

GREENE: (Laughter) You can hear it.

INSKEEP: You actually don't have to tell me how excited you are, David. I can - I knew, I knew. But go on, go on. Anyway, your Steelers were excited themselves about the game in the locker room, which we usually don't get to see, except that this time a wide receiver Antonio Brown pulled out his phone and started streaming the locker room party to Facebook Live.

GREENE: Yeah, our star wide receiver, and this was just not a good idea as we hear here from Cindy Boren. She's a sports reporter for The Washington Post.

CINDY BOREN: There was a lot of nonsense in it, you know, just yelling and screaming and jibberish. But then you could hear a voice in the background talking about the upcoming game. And that voice clearly belonged to Mike Tomlin, the coach.

INSKEEP: The Steelers coach who apparently has no idea that he's being sent out to the world.

GREENE: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

MIKE TOMLIN: When you get to this point in the journey, man, not a lot needs to be said [expletive] but let's say very little moving forward. Let's start our [expletive] preparations. We spotted those [expletive] a day and a half.

GREENE: So the worst part, Steve, Tomlin used a vulgar term to refer to the Patriots, so the Patriots now have more motivation. And here's the crazy thing - Tomlin actually ended his speech by telling players to lay low this week, stay off social media.

INSKEEP: (Laughter) Don't curse about the other team or anything like that (laughter). And we should say we do Facebook Live here. Facebook pays NPR to make live videos that run on the site. But this is news.

GREENE: But not in our locker room.

INSKEEP: We're talking about this because it's news.

GREENE: Not in our locker room (laughter). In an in NFL locker room, you'd think - I mean, players, coaches, they think this is private, and sports journalists, they've just been piling on. This is Manish Mehta, an NFL columnist for the New York Daily News.

MANISH MEHTA: Well, there are myriad factors. One, of course, is you don't want to rile up the other team needlessly. And of course it's disrespectful to the coach because you have a coach here relaying a specific message to his team that's not meant to be heard not only by fans, but it's certainly not meant to be heard by the opponents.

INSKEEP: It was actually heard by more than one million people before it was taken down on Monday. It's not clear, by the way, if Antonio Brown is going to face any consequences.

GREENE: Yeah, as in fines. But consequences the team might face - I can imagine some of what Coach Tomlin said about the Patriots probably already up in the Patriots locker room. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.