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Earlier this offseason, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback and likely future Hall of Famer Ben Roethlisberger retired after an 18-year career. As the team prepares for its first season without him since the early 2000s, Roethlisberger has some things to say.

We have already detailed his assertion that former Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert wanted Roethlisberger to retire earlier, while the Rooney family was happy to let him continue playing. In the same story where Roethlisberger commented on Colbert, he also talked about the way his career as a whole has panned out.

Asked by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (h/t ProFootballTalk) about his career regret, Roethlisberger first mentioned the team’s Super Bowl XLV loss to the Green Bay Packers. Then, he appeared to blame the team’s lack of playoff success more recently compared to the beginning of his career, on the coddling of younger players.

Another big disappointment was the fact that the Steelers only won three playoff games since that 2010 run to the Super Bowl.

“I feel like the game has changed. I feel like the people have changed in a sense. Maybe because I came in spoiled when I came in. The team was so important. It was all about the team. Now, it’s about me and this, that and the other.

“I might be standing on a soapbox a little bit, but this is my biggest takeaway from when I started until the end. I changed from a team-first attitude to a me attitude. It was hard. It’s hard for these young people, too. Social media. They’re being treated so well in college. Now, this new NIL stuff, which is incredible. They’re treated so special. They’re being coded at a young age because the college coaches need them to win, too. I know coach [Terry] Hoeppner never bit me [at Miami of Ohio]. Neither did [Bill] Cowher.”

Roethlisberger claiming that today’s players are coddled — but he wasn’t — is pretty rich, considering the way the Steelers focused their offense on him even as he was clearly down and then he was in ‘sub-substitute level as a player during his finals. seasons.

The Steelers maintained one of the league’s lowest play action rates because he didn’t like to turn his back on the defense. They rarely utilized the pre-snap motion because he felt it affected his picture of the defense. Both play-action and movement have been shown to have positive effects on pass efficiency, which the Steelers desperately needed to address in Roethlisberger’s later years. But Roethlisberger preferred to sit shotgun and fire quick passes near the line of scrimmage, putting the onus on the team’s skill position players to do most of the work on offense. – and the Steelers accommodated him. (Perhaps the omission of Mike Tomlin as a coach who never fought was purposeful, and he would acknowledge that he was coddled later in his career?)

As our friends at PFT have pointed out, Roethlisberger has also benefited from friendly media treatment, the one with the near memory hole of the sexual assault and rape allegations leveled against him early in his career. (No charges were filed, but Roethlisberger was suspended for violating the league’s personal conduct policy and ordered by commissioner Roger Goodell to undergo a “comprehensive behavioral evaluation by professionals.”) The allegations were rarely mentioned, let alone the focus of intense attention, as he received (mostly deservedly, based solely on the totality of his achievements on the field) something like living legend treatment during his final season of the NFL.

In any case, the assertion that today’s players are coddled but Roethlisberger was not, would not reasonably be expected to lead to a relative lack of success for the Steelers but not other NFL teams. After all, teams like the Saints, Packers, Giants, Ravens, Seahawks, Patriots, Broncos, Eagles, Chiefs, Buccaneers, and Rams presumably used players younger than Roethlisberger on their way to winning Super Bowls XLIV through LVI.

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