The offseason is inevitably a period of projection and speculation, which makes it the ideal time to ponder the hypotheticals that the Pittsburgh Steelers will face over the course of the next year, whether it is addressing free agency, the draft, performance on the field, or some more ephemeral topic.
That is what I will look to address in our Buy or Sell series. In each installment, I will introduce a topic statement and weigh some of the arguments for either buying it (meaning that you agree with it or expect it to be true) or selling it (meaning you disagree with it or expect it to be false).
The range of topics will be intentionally wide, from the general to the specific, from the immediate to that in the far future. And as we all tend to have an opinion on just about everything, I invite you to share your own each morning on the topic statement of the day.
Topic Statement: Should (or will) Ben Roethlisberger address the offseason talk about him as OTAs open next week?
Explanation: Roethlisberger was the subject of a lot of negative chatter at the start of the offseason. He also happens to have a penchant for talking when he gets the opportunity to be in front of a microphone. So it’s fair to wonder if he is going to talk about the comments made by Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell.
Buy:
I’ve already made the argument that he shouldn’t comment on the subject, so I can’t do that at this point. But I can make the case for him doing so anyway. After all, it’s not like he doesn’t have a history of shooting from the hip, even in the locker room but especially on his radio show.
In fact, he ended up making several comments about Brown over the course of the past season, either directly or indirectly. I could definitely see him making some allusion to the interception that he threw in the end zone against the Broncos.
The fact of the matter is that he is on much better footing than he was a couple of months ago. He’s coming fresh off of some good PR with a new contract, a new sense of commitment, and a nice relaxing trip with his teammates. He’s primed to open his mouth.
Sell:
But that doesn’t mean that he will, and he shouldn’t. Not that doing so will necessarily do any harm, but I believe there is little to gain, to the point that the risks outweigh the rewards. Unless he simply weighs the pleasure of making some passive-aggressive toward some former teammates.
Given that he has reportedly been weighing the possibility of no longer doing his radio show this season—it’s worth noting that by this time last year, he already did one in which he infamously talked about Mason Rudolph making Joshua Dobbs a wasted pick—I don’t believe he is going to do that this time, choosing to move on as the rest of the organization has.
