Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is indisputably the old man on the roster. while he is not the only over-30 player, they have become few and far between. Ramon Foster is four years younger than he is, as the second-oldest member of the team.
So he has a harder time relating to his younger teammates than most. While he will listen to JuJu Smith-Schuster explain how the current most popular video game is like, it’s not what he’s familiar with. But he understands that they grew up in a different era.
“Some of these guys, it’s all they’ve known from the first phone that they ever had, whether they were like middle school, elementary school, whenever it was. It’s social media”, he said on his radio show on 93.7 FM.” So they only know one way, and it’s hard to break habits. They enjoy using their platforms to reach fans”.
I’m sure you can gather that the reason the subject came up was because of Antonio Brown’s latest remark, in which he responded to a former team employee’s comment about his success being due to playing with Roethlisberger. He Tweeted back, “trade me lets find out”, suggesting that he can have the same success without him.
“There is definitely some good that comes with it, but I think if you’re going to do it, you have to not get caught up in reading all of the” responses from fans, Roethlisberger said. “You’ve just got to stay away from that stuff. If you want to Tweet things, that’s fine, but just, when you get in trouble is when you start responding to other people”.
That is of course what both Brown and Bud Dupree did this week. That is what Martavis Bryant did last year. Santonio Holmes did it many years ago as well. Others on the current roster also do it regularly, though take it outside of an inflammatory context.
Still, when it comes to those issues actually affecting what happens on the field, Roethlisberger doesn’t believe it to be a problem. “I don’t think so”, he said when he was asked if he thought it had a negative effect on the games.
“I really don’t. I think you’ve gotten to this level for a reason. You’ve gotten here because you’re talented, you’re able to put things behind you, you’re able to focus singularly on your job and your task”, he told his hosts. “So I would hope that guys would be able to do that and really just go out and do your job and put the off the field things behind you and really just focus on your brothers and trying to win for them. so I don’t think that it becomes a distractions once you get on the field and the whistle blows on Sunday”.
Of course, Roethlisberger can only answer for himself. You can’t possibly know what is on another person’s mind at a given time. Chances are, he’s probably wrong, at least to some degree. But just imagine what we would be talking about today if he said otherwise.
