Rashard Mendenhall can’t stop talking about Super Bowl XLV. After claiming he didn’t fumble the ball in a crucial moment in the fourth quarter of the game, Mendenhall is now claiming that the rest of the team didn’t take the game seriously enough and were too interested in trying to be stars. During an appearance on the Raw Room podcast, Mendenhall claims the Steelers didn’t treat Super Bowl XLV the same as they did Super Bowl XLIII.
“We was still interested in the Super Bowl, and being stars and guys was driving to go to events. I’m like, yo man, we got one more week man, one more game to really hone in,” Mendenhall said. “At that time, most of our team had been to the Super Bowl, already had a ring, already had two really, been there twice because of ’06, [Jerome Bettis] last year. I felt like we took that one a little more for granted. We didn’t go in with that same fire I saw in ’08.”
Mendenhall also took issue with head coach Mike Tomlin bringing famous director Spike Lee to practice the week ahead of the Super Bowl.
It seems as if Mendenhall is just trying to find any reason to explain why Pittsburgh lost that isn’t his fumble. Of course, in this story, he was the voice of reason, while the rest of his teammates and his head coach were just focused on the limelight. The Mendenhall fumble obviously wasn’t the sole reason Pittsburgh lost the game, as Ben Roethlisberger’s two interceptions didn’t help the cause, but the Steelers were in a position to take the lead early in the fourth quarter when Mendenhall turned it over. It certainly didn’t aid Pittsburgh’s chances of winning.
In retirement, Mendenhall seemed to have taken issue with a lot of his former teammates, specifically Roethlisberger. A few times a year, he pops up, usually on Twitter, with something to say that’s negative about his experiences in Pittsburgh. In this case, maybe the Steelers did get a little caught up in the glitz and the glamour of being a Super Bowl team. But they were still in a position to win the game, and I really doubt that the activities in the week leading up to the Super Bowl had a tangible impact on what went down in the game itself.
It was a disappointing loss, and Pittsburgh is still looking for their seventh Super Bowl after losing to the Packers. But it’s really not a good look for Mendenhall to come out now over 12 years later and try to blame his teammates and Tomlin for losing focus ahead of the game as an excuse for the loss. It’s time to move on.
