While the Pittsburgh Steelers did not have a disastrous offseason, it was also far from smooth sailing. From contract angst with Le’Veon Bell to dealing with the lingering effects of Martavis Bryant’s suspension to some legal trouble for a pair of players, things could have gone better.
One of those players who ran into legal trouble, second-year cornerback Artie Burns, talked a bit about his experiences earlier today with ESPN reporter Jeremy Fowler. The former first-round draft pick said that he spent a few hours in jail following his arrest for driving with a suspended license in June.
According to Fowler, Burns characterized the situation as a “misunderstanding”, saying, in the reporter’s words, “he was still in the process of switching his paperwork and insurance to Pennsylvania”. The starting cornerback was arrested in Florida.
The former Miami Hurricane noted that he was pulled over as a matter of routine, indicating that, as Fowler writes, “Miami Beach police does a lot of traffic checks at night time”. Burns characterized the incident as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He did, of course, have a number of tickets in the backlog of his history as a driver in the state of Florida, which is what got his license suspended in the first place. As one commenter has consistently noted and accused me of hypocrisy for omitting last time even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, among the tickets that he was previously issued was a speeding ticket for driving 130 miles per hour. So please feel free to judge the young man harshly for that even though we don’t even know when that might have occurred, since that is what the commenter seems to want to happen.
Burns is no doubt looking to put this situation behind him as quickly as possible. I would hope by now that he has already shifted his information over from Florida to Pennsylvania, or at least has the wheels comfortably in motion.
As mentioned, he had a number of violations in his history, but I’ve seen no reports that have actually indicated at what time those violations may have happened, including the aforementioned excessive speeding incident. It is not known what other violation behind the driving with a suspended license fault may have occurred since he was drafted.
These days, Burns is hoping to use his blazing speed on the practice field to keep up with All-Pro wide receiver Antonio Brown, whom he has spent his time shadowing over the course of the first two days of training camp.
The Steelers are counting on the young man to show tremendous growth on the field in comparison to his rookie season, while retaining the ball skills that he flashed, intercepting three passes with an additional 13 passes defensed.
