It certainly seems as though, for much of the national media who might not follow things as closely, there is nothing that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger can do right. The 15-year veteran gave an interview recently and spoke to reporters yesterday addressing much of the offseason drama. Many came away from it all with a favorable view, but several national media pundits had a different interpretation.
Former defensive end Marcus Spears’ was probably the most egregious, referencing specifically Roethlisberger’s suggestion that he still considers Brown a friend as though he doesn’t realize that the relationship is permanently severed.
A former first-round draft pick of the Dallas Cowboys, Spears spent eight years in Dallas before signing with the Baltimore Ravens on a two-year deal, but he was released in the middle of his first season with the team and did not play again. Could he have grown an anti-Steelers bias that quickly?
“Here’s the issue for me, though. When we were talking about this Steelers situation, Ben [said] ‘me and AB are fine. We were act practice laughing’, and he reached out to Le’Veon”, he said. “No you didn’t. I told y’all he didn’t. I told y’all the relationship was strained already. AB wanted to be out of Pittsburgh”.
He went on to claim that “Ben made two fatal mistakes that you can’t make in the NFL. One, call your teammates out. Two, try to play a fake game and day y’all cool when you know y’all not. Once that happens, that relationship between you and that player, whether it’s business or personal, is gone, so that’s what happened with him and AB”.
Of course, Spears actually just made this up out of thin air and doesn’t hold any kind of validity. It’s extremely common practice for players, coaches, owners, and everybody else to say everything is fine when things are not. It happens all the time. Sometimes things get better (in most of these cases, you’ll have never even heard there was a problem). In other cases, they don’t, or they get worse, and things like the Brown situation happens.
“Now for him to come out and say this, as crazy as it was for AB and the things that he said, and by no means am I not giving him the foolishness that he was doing as well, but the part about Ben, I told y’all AB was not lying about it”, Spears concluded.
What exactly is he saying that Brown was not lying about? Did Roethlisberger’s comments reflect some ‘owner’s mentality’ or something? Would we ever have even heard any of this nonsense had the Steelers immediately agreed to trade him because he wanted a bigger contract?
