It’s always fun…or not…to watch outside agents interject themselves into situations in which they are not involved. We have seen a large number of people doing that in behalf of or in opposition to Antonio Brown over the course of the past month following his beef with the Pittsburgh Steelers, with the latest being Hall of Fame wide receiver Terrell Owens.
As we relayed yesterday, Owens said that he has spoken to Brown throughout the season as “somewhat of a mentor” and gets the sense from him that he is looking to start over with a new team, wanting to leave the baggage of the Steelers behind him.
One thing that Owens mentioned was Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and his role in dealing with Brown. While we have heard a lot of stories about the relationship between the two, the only things we can verify are what we see (on the sidelines) and hear (on Roethlisberger’s radio show).
“I don’t like how Ben has kind of thrown him under the bus in certain instances”, Owens told Mike Florio regarding Brown. Roethlisberger has certainly made some public comments about his star receiver, there’s no denying that. He has talked about Brown on the field a number of times on his radio show this past season, and admittedly it hasn’t always been positive.
“I think Ben owes him a lot more respect than he has given him”, Owens maintained. Of course, this is Terrell Owens we’re talking about, and he would say the same thing about how he was handled over the course of his career, even though he was much more of a public issue for his teams than Brown has been up to this point.
Owens went so far as to talk about things he could have no way of experiencing firsthand, criticizing Roethlisberger for “saying he didn’t know anything about a blowing up when he was part of the blowup”, referring to the alleged incident during a walkthrough on the Wednesday prior to the season finale, which multiple teammates have gone on the record to deny having happened, either in whole or in part, as had been described.
Realistically, it goes without saying that the relationship that Brown has with Roethlisberger is surely a part of his issues with the team. Maybe Roethlisberger doesn’t coddle him as much as he thinks that he should because of the number of touchdowns that he catches. Or at least doesn’t do it consistently enough.
On the other hand, we have also heard multiple times now that Roethlisberger’s public tendency to ‘call out’ teammates is something that is wearing on the locker room, or at least some in the locker room. While I don’t personally have much of an issue with it, if the locker room does, then it is something that should be addressed.
