There’s probably not a player in the Pittsburgh Steelers’ locker room more motivated to see an end to the ‘drama’ than Ramon Foster, the oldest player on the team that has never experienced the feeling of winning a Super Bowl.
Foster is in his 10th season and in the final year of his contract at the age of 32. His future is uncertain. He is at a point in his career in which he understands that any season could be his last, so he can’t afford to waste any of them with nonsense that is counterproductive toward achieving his ultimate goal, which is winning a championship.
That is why he reacted so strongly when teammate Le’Veon Bell chose not to report to the team to start the season after suggesting to his linemen otherwise. Bell is apparently electing to sit out most or all of the season in order to preserve his body for the 2019 free agency period, during which he is expected to sign with another team.
Foster made some pointed remarks that included touching on the fact that Bell was going to be paid substantially more than most of the men blocking for him, who deal with just as many injuries, yet who never come off the field. His candidness drew him both praise and scorn—a fair bit of the latter from former players in the media.
A few weeks on, and now dealing with the Antonio Brown show, his message is this: “it has to die”. The drama has to be put behind the team so that they can move forward and focus on winning games, something that they have failed to do over the course of the first two weeks of the season.
And he believes the team will get over that hump. “It will die out”, he said. “We respond according to what we need to do, and that’s winning games”.
But it would help if they actually had everybody out on the field. The Steelers could be without several starters for tomorrow’s game, including two along the offensive line with David DeCastro and Marcus Gilbert dealing with injuries. Foster himself missed training camp and the preseason with an injury of his own.
The veteran, who not coincidentally recently made his Twitter account private, said that when “you give them nothing, they have nothing”. In other words, if you don’t give people any reason to talk about you, then they won’t.
He said that there is “way too much stuff going on not to learn from this. Nobody is invincible. Nobody is shunned from any bad things happening, whether that’s on the field or off the field”. But he added that the outside chatter is just “talking points”, and that the locker room is “good”.
