If you thought the reactions to Sunday’s loss to the Arizona Cardinals were bad, it seems that was just a prelude of what was to come. Of course, there is going to be a certain level of frustration when a team with a winning record drops two games in a five-day span to a pair of teams that were eight games below .500. Especially since they made history in becoming the first team to ever do that.
You know it’s bad when S Minkah Fitzpatrick starts calling out his teammates, suggesting that some in the locker room play with an entitled mindset and questioning how much they love the game and the work that it takes to be great. And he had a Steelers alum, Ryan Clark, agreeing with him.
“When you’re in Pittsburgh, you can sort of get a feeling of entitlement”, he said on ESPN yesterday, talking about walking the halls and running into Hall of Famers from past teams like Mel Blount and Joe Green and Franco Harris.
“You constantly saw all of these Hall of Famers, all of these all-time greats. And you walk past those six Lombardi Trophies every day, and you feel like you’re a part of that heritage”, he went on. “But you aren’t. You have to earn that. You aren’t entitled to go out there and win games. You can’t will games down to current players. You can’t give them the blueprint to do it”.
Frankly, this is a point Clark seems to fall back to a little too often whenever the Steelers aren’t playing at their best—that the current team is not a part of their championship legacy—and since he was a part of one of those Lombardis, he gets the chance to talk.
But it’s simply the truth that since Ben Roethlisberger walked out the door, there hasn’t been a player in that locker room who had anything to do with their last championship. Indeed, he’d been the only one left standing for a while.
Those guys are long gone. Who was the most recent? James Harrison? William Gay? Lawrence Timmons? Not that this is any surprise. We’re a long way off from 2008. It’s been a decade and a half since their last championship. Not that they’re easy to win, but the guys on the team now were children, or perhaps in high school, back then.
Everybody seems to mention the Lombardi Trophy display case among their first impressions of joining the Steelers. But are some people taking the wrong impression from it? It’s not about admiring the past, it’s about adding to the future.
“I do think that Minkah Fitzpatrick is seeing that within the building”, Clark said, indicating that he believes Fitzpatrick’s comments come from genuine observation. “He’s seeing it in the building. He’s seeing it in the film room. He’s seeing it on the practice field”.
All you can really do is hope that’s not true, but really, does it make a difference? It’s not going to change anything.
