Feb 16, 2019 6 min read

Ron Hughes didn’t like to do interviews. He didn’t like to talk about himself and the things he had accomplished.

But the Charleroi High School and California State College graduate was instrumental in building the Steelers’ last three Super Bowl teams.

After graduating from California with a degree in education, Hughes became an assistant high school football coach at Bishop Canevin and later at North Catholic, where one of his players was a young Kevin Colbert.

After 14 years of coaching high school football and teaching biology, Hughes was hired in 1979 by BLESTO as an area college scout before joining the Detroit Lions in 1982 as a college scout.

Two years later, the Lions promoted Hughes to the position of Director of Player Personnel, essentially the team’s general manager. He helped the Lions in 1991 to its first – and only – playoff win since 1957. Yes, the Lions were that bad.

It was at Detroit where Hughes hired Colbert to be part of his scouting staff. Colbert returned the favor in 2001 after Hughes was ousted in Detroit in favor of Matt Millen – how’d that work out? In 2003, Hughes was promoted to college scouting coordinator, a position he held until his retirement in 2015.

That means Hughes was not only responsible for the Lions selecting Barry Sanders in the draft, he also oversaw the Steelers’ drafting of players such as Troy Polamalu, Ben Roethlisberger and a number of the other stars who helped Pittsburgh win two Super Bowls and reach another.

Hughes died suddenly this past week at his home in the Detroit suburbs. He leaves behind his wife, Adrianne, three children, Ted, Scott and Jennifer (Antoniotti), and four grandchildren. He also leaves behind a heck of a football legacy.

• Art Rooney II and Antonio Brown are to meet next week in Florida after Brown initially spurned Rooney’s attempts at a sitdown.

Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall for that get together?

When I interviewed Rooney last month, he said he wasn’t sure for the reasoning behind Brown’s decision to skip out on the Steelers’ final regular-season game and then not return phone calls from anyone in the organization.

Since then, Brown’s agent, Drew Rosenhaus, has asked for a trade on behalf of his client. And Brown has continued with an offseason of, ahem, questionable behavior. Agreeing to meet with Rooney is the first normal thing Brown has done in the past two months.

• John Sacco wrote a fascinating series in the
• Observer-Reporter
• on the chasm between public and private schools in Pennsylvania athletics.

And there most certainly are issues there that have been around for a long, long time.

But to pretend that recruiting doesn’t happen between public schools and is just as prevalent also ignores the problem.

There are certainly rules in place to keep players from transferring from one public school to another, but anyone who follows high school athletics knows it happens.

When it happens and players get away with it, however, it’s usually with a wink and a nod. The aggrieved school gets angry about it, then has no problem doing the same thing to another school.

The bottom line is that if a family wants to move to – or in the case of private schools, pay – send their child to another school district, that should be their decision. If it’s for athletic intent, how is that any different than choosing to move to a district because it has a better college placement situation?

Is that fair to kids who live in a lesser district and can’t afford to move? Sure. But there’s little fair about the way our state handles its school systems, anyway.

Take a walk through any of the schools in the more affluent areas of our region and then head out to one of the rural ones. Yes, there are good teachers at both. But they are getting two decidedly different educations.

• Ever wonder how recruiting services come up with grades on players?

If you had any question that it was based solely on what schools are recruiting the player, that was answered this week.

A few high school kids came up with a fake prospect, Blake Carrienger, creating a social media account for the supposedly 6-6, 315-pound lineman. On the account, he said he was pleased to have received offers from a number of SEC schools.

Well, that put him on the radar of the recruiting websites. Sight unseen – obviously – one recruiting service listed him as a three-star prospect and even had a nice synopsis of his supposed talents. Another site also listed him as a three-star prospect, though it didn’t have any description.

Keep that in mind when you’re watching your school’s rankings come commitment time. The recruiting services have seen a large portion of these players. But in many cases, they’re basing their opinion on which schools are looking at the prospect.

That’s definitely putting the cart in front of the horse.

• NFL teams can begin placing franchise and transition tags on players starting Tuesday. It will make for some interesting moves.

Many times, when teams lock up the kind of money involved in tagging a player, they’ll make corresponding moves to clear salary cap space. And those players who are released are not always cut because they can’t play, but because they’re making too much money.

For example, Kansas City is expected to place the franchise tag on outside linebacker Dee Ford and could release longtime star Justin Houston, who will count $21 million against the salary cap in 2019. So, while the free-agent market looks one way Feb. 17, by the time the signing period begins March 13, it could look completely different.

The only difference is that players released between now and then can be signed immediately. And released players don’t count in the equation when the league looks at future compensatory picks.