The suddenly topical difference between Jeff Reed's situation and Santonio Holmes' situation is apparently pretty complicated, but in terms of carpeting, it's only about five feet.

That's the distance from which Reed is situated from Holmes in the dressing room, with only one locker between them, which belongs to Casey Hampton. It's just a few steps, unless the Big Snack happens to be home, then it's a bit of a walk, owing to Hampton's circumference.

No one thought much about the difference between Reed and Holmes as defined by carpet or in any other way until Sunday night, when Reed and teammate Matt Spaeth had a meeting with Pittsburgh police officers that could have gone better. The Steelers kicker wound up charged with disorderly conduct, public intoxication, simple assault and resisting arrest, the result of his alleged interference with an orderly processing of the tight end, who was alleged to have been violating the always pesky statute prohibiting public urination.

"There's a lot more investigating to do with this," Reed said yesterday, "so I'm not really going to talk about it."

Reed talked about some other things, like how he loves the community and it loves him back, and like how he loves the organization and it loves him back.

"I talked with Mr. Rooney [the ambassador, passing through on his way to Washington on State Department business], to Kevin [Colbert] and to coach Tomlin. They told me what they thought, and it was not negative."

Dan Rooney confirmed as much, indicating that the Holmes situation was very different.

Different it was, but in what relevant way to the dichotomous outcomes isn't really clear.

Holmes' SUV was stopped near Mellon Arena one year ago tomorrow on suspicion that it was carrying a large amount of marijuana. That was incorrect.

It was only carrying a small amount.

Asked if he'd been smoking those three blunts on the console, Holmes said that he was not. But, he said helpfully, he'd smoked 'em the day before.

A model of cooperation with the authorities.

Ultimately, lest anyone forget, the charges against Holmes were dropped when the district attorney agreed with Holmes' defense that the reasons for stopping the vehicle were legally dubious.

But for this "distraction," coming less than 72 hours before a home game with the defending Super Bowl Champion New York Football Giants, Holmes was sent home and told to come back Monday.

For this week's "distraction," coming most of a week before a home game with the Minnesota Vikings, Reed got a reassurance that he'd be playing Sunday and a de facto thank you from Tomlin for leaving as much time between his arrest and the next kickoff as humanly possible.

I suppose someone could get arrested less than five hours after game, but I don't want to know how.

Holmes, asked for comment on these wildly different outcomes yesterday, said this:

"Nope."

If it was bothering Santonio that a bogus charge got him shelved for a game the club wound up losing by a touchdown while the kicker got a pass for a similarly unresolved four-count incident a year later, he was not biting on it.

"I got nothin' to do with that," Holmes said. "That all goes on upstairs."

Upstairs, one day earlier, Tomlin had answered question after question on the apparent inconsistency -- some would say hypocrisy -- of his approach to the two incidents with something less than his usual aplomb. He could have no commented it right into the middle of next week, and deserves a good measure of credit for not doing that. But his well-framed explanations lacked weight.

He said the action against Holmes was not punitive. How can you tell a starting wideout he's not playing Sunday without being punitive? He said the timing of the Holmes' incident, which left him about 48 hours until game time to deal with a "distraction," necessitated immediate action.

Call it an emergency distractionectomy.

But Holmes was part of the Giants game plan, presumably. By removing him from Bruce Arians' equation, I'll bet it took a lot more recalculation than putting a uniform on another kicker for a week.

"I'm kind of shocked to hear people asking if I was gonna play or not," Reed said. "Stuff like this happens, you just gotta deal with it; it makes you tougher. And I'm a captain of this team. It may not sound like it when something like this comes up, but I like to represent this team as well as I can, and you know that through all the charity stuff I do and events like that."

No word yesterday from the annual Best Foot Forward sock drive for the homeless on whether Reed has in any way jeopardized his honorary chairmanship. I'm guessing Jeff's OK there, too. He'd be shocked to learn otherwise, I'm sure.

No one's in a better position to know when to deactivate a player in these situations than Tomlin and his superiors, so when I tell you Reed should stay home until after the Vikings game, it's only because a lot of times, just the appearance of inconsistency can be its own locker room malignancy.

Gene Collier's "Two-Minute Warning" videos are featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.