Brick-Headed Radio Jock Thinks Big Ben Is A Little Too Big

According to some guy who evidently uses the nickname “The Brick”, the Pittsburgh Steelers have been seeing too much of quarterback Ben Roethlisberger lately. To be more specific, he believes that they have gotten about 10 or 15 pounds too much of him.

This astute analysis come from “J.T.”, John Tourmour, who apparently won something called a “Smack-Off” that is associated with the ever-insightful and always-inflammatory Jim Rome. A stock broker-turned-person-who-calls-into-Jim-Rome’s-show-turned-guy who yells-loudly-like-Jim-Rome, “The Brick” stuck one—or perhaps his foot—in his mouth during his radio show recently on Fox Sports.

If you are overweight by 10 to 15 pounds and you are in accounting, you work at a bar, you work on sports radio, that’s okay. When you’re the quarterback of the Steelers and you’re out of shape and you can’t run a bootleg, you can’t run an inside pistol, and you can’t run a quarterback sneak because you’re too heavy to jump over the pile, you’ve got to get on Roethlisberger. Why is Big Ben Roethlisberger 10 to 15 pounds overweight? Why is he Chubby Elvis in a game like this? Shouldn’t he be like, cut? And just like, ripped, and like lining up in the shot running over people at the goal line?

This is the brilliant sort of insight that you get when you listen to angertainment media, an endless barrage of hot takes and lukewarm-at-best logic whose sole purpose is simply to draw ratings by creating absurdity, which attracts attention. After all, I am covering it now.

But, of course, this is not the first “Roethlisberger is not in shape” nonsense that we have seen over the years, although it is the first one that I can recall in recent years that came during the NFL season. Typically, this is what we hear at the start of the offseason program or on the eve of training camp.

And, typically, it regularly dies down and then we get the “Roethlisberger is in the best shape of his life” barrage that conveniences misses the point that he is actually always in shape every year, but stupid national media narratives like this one are the cause for that.

If Roethlisberger were truly in the best shape of his life for every new season that he was described as in the best shape of his life, then he would look like peak Michael Phelps by now. And far from the “Chubby Elvis” designation that “The Brick” and his mime co-host provided, Roethlisberger simply looks like the soon-to-be-35-year-old, 6’5”, 250-pound quarterback that he is.

Roethlisberger has never been particularly mobile in the sense that “The Brick” seems to be referring to, but he was clear in his post-game interview that the Steelers did not run a quarterback sneak because that was not the play that was called for him to run, because the Patriots were lined up to stop it. Of course, that’s not going to stop loud mouths attached to lazy brains from drumming up horse manure for the sake of ratings. And, unfortunately, it’s not going to stop me from fighting back against it either.