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: Will you be tuning in to Antonio Brown’s segment on The Shop set to air today?
In spite of the many things that we have heard from or about Antonio Brown over the course of the past two months, one thing we haven’t seen yet was an extended conversation with him. He appeared in an interview or two and in a couple of videos on social media, but they were not substantive dialogues that really explored his position on his situation with the Steelers.
Perhaps that is what we will get tomorrow as Brown sits down with LeBron James and others to ‘talk shop’ on the appropriately named The Shop on HBO. In a preview of the show, he made direct reference to General Manager Kevin Colbert’s ’52 kids’ remark and used that to justify his position that he wasn’t getting the respect he deserves on the team.
What’s more, he said that things aren’t getting any better. And all of this obviously happened after he already met with Art Rooney II, following which he posted a picture of himself with the Steelers president in what seemed like something of a peace offering on his way out the door.
So the question is this: is the preview of the episode a teaser of an explosive diatribe, or is this really going to be the sum total of his thoughts? It’s unfortunate but also rather uninteresting that he would have taken offense to the ‘kids’ comment, from my perspective, for reasons I’ve detailed multiple times already, so I would like to see what he has to say on other matters, quite frankly. Colbert’s remark came well after any supposed problems he would have had.
But many Steelers fans just have such fatigue with Brown at this point that they don’t even care what he has to say and are just waiting for him to be traded. I can’t say I blame them, but the reality is that he is a Steeler until he isn’t.
