The Pittsburgh Steelers are out of Latrobe and back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, also referred to as the South Side Facility. We are already into the regular season, where everything is magnified and, you know, actually counts. The team is working through the highs and lows and dramas that go through a typical Steelers season.
How are the rookies performing? What about the players that the team signed in free agency? Who is missing time with injuries, and when are they going to be back? What are the coaches saying about what they are going to do this season that might be different from how it was a year ago?
These are the sorts of questions among many others that we have been exploring on a daily basis and will continue to do so. Football has become a year-round pastime and there is always a question to be asked, though there is rarely a concrete answer, as I’ve learned in my years of doing this.
Question: Why did Antonio Brown wait until now to comment publicly on the issues that were bothering him?
More or less, what Antonio Brown had to say yesterday was nothing we haven’t already been told. While it’s different when you hear it confirmed directly from the player himself, we all pretty much knew his feelings on the things he was asked on Twitter yesterday.
And he know, of course, exactly what questions he would get. He had specific questions that he wanted to answer, to get his side of the story out there. But why did he choose now in order to address the topic when he had so many other opportunities?
He hinted at an interview multiple times that never surfaced. He was supposed to talk to Bill Simmons. He did give a short interview at the Super Bowl in which he made some testy comments, but didn’t ultimately address anything specific, and more or less said at that point that he wouldn’t.
But then he did. He complained about Ben Roethlisberger. He complained about Mike Tomlin. He complained about his reputation. It was everything that we knew he was going to say because it was what we have been told all along that is what he thinks, whether his thinking is justified or not.
Did the timing come up because of some of the backlash that he received the day before when he waivered over whether or not he would meet with Art Rooney II? And does he think that he did himself a favor in terms of his public image because he got ‘his story’ out there, which is what he said he wanted to do all along?
