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: What is your reaction to Ben Roethlisberger’s comments over the course of the past couple of days?
Outside of some brief, boilerplate comments from the start of the offseason program, it wasn’t until this week that we really heard from Ben Roethlisberger for the first time in months, since the season ended, even though his name has pretty much constantly been in the sports headlines because of one criticism or another.
He addressed most of them among other topics during a KDKA interview and while speaking to reporters to start OTAs, no doubt in the hopes of getting the vast majority of the questions out of the way now so that they don’t continue to bleed into the actual working portion of the offseason.
The question now is, with the first barrage over, how did he handle it? Obviously there were some ‘interesting’ takes in the 24-hour national media—among some, Roethlisberger seemingly cannot do anything right—but the local reporters have seemed to be more than appeased by the 37-year-old quarterbacks’ answers.
At the very least, he didn’t say anything inflammatory. He seemed to be working under the understanding this offseason that he will be more careful, which is to say more guarded, when he speaks from now on. If he hasn’t learned that people aren’t always going to take what you say to mean what you intended, then he’s never going to learn that.
There have been strong reactions from both sides, some calling him a phony, others saying that he’s ‘learned his lessons’ and is suddenly a better teammate and human being in general because a guy with a milk mustache called him a doodoo head.
Personally, I think he pretty much said what he ought to have said, but do you agree? Are there some things you liked and others you didn’t?
