Written at Peter King at MMQB.com
News about a fun Super Bowl week event in Houston in a few paragraphs—podcast fun and good beer—but we open on a non-Super Bowl bit of news from Tuesday: Ben Roethlisberger hinting that, at 34, he may have played his last snap for the Steelers.
First: I do not believe he will quit. Not for a second. But I do have some interpretation of his comments.
In an appearance on 93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh, Roethlisberger said in the wake of the Steelers’ AFC Championship Game no-show in New England: “I’m going to take this offseason to evaluate, to consider all options, to consider health and family and things like that and just kind of take some time away to evaluate next season, if there’s going to be a next season.” He said he wasn’t meaning to say he wasn’t coming back, just that he wanted to take some time to decide his future.
I’ll tell you what I think. And understand that this is a reading of the tea leaves. I have not spoken to Roethlisberger. I have not spoken to his agent, Ryan Tollner. But I have noticed this season that Roethlisberger has seemed frustrated with a few things. I am not absolving him of his share of the blame for the offensive performance, to be sure. The Steelers, in the divisional victory at Kansas City and the title game at New England, managed two touchdowns in two games. This makes it far worse: Over 110 minutes—the game in Kansas City and the first 50 minutes at New England—Roethlisberger managed zero touchdown passes in the most important games of the year. Even without the suspended Martavis Bryant, and even with Le’Veon Bell getting hurt in the first half of the AFC Championship Game, this is a feeble two-game performance by what is supposed to be one of the most explosive offenses in football.
I think, particularly in his post-Kansas City criticism last week of the selfish Antonio Brown, and this week of the team’s lack of maturity and readiness for the game, that Roethlisberger was focusing his frustration on three people: Brown (to be sure), coach Mike Tomlin and offensive coordinator Todd Haley.
The dissing of Brown is easy. He’s too often this year been immature, and if Roethlisberger had to settle him down on the sidelines at Foxboro—which has been reported—it’s an Odell Beckham-like bout of baby behavior that simply has to stop. Brown’s too great a player to be sulking. He’s the major reason why the Steelers won the division in the first place, after his reach over the goal line resulted in the AFC North-winning touchdown on Christmas against Baltimore.
I got the sense, regarding the Roethlisberger/Tomlin situation, that the quarterback is frustrated that Brown is acting up over and over again, and the coach hasn’t stopped it. Good on Tomlin for forcefully going after Brown after the Facebook incident last week, but little things have flared up often this year.
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