Who amongst us hasn’t attended a major sporting event and taken decisive steps to beat the traffic? Pittsburgh RB LeGarette Blount safely presumed he’d not be seeing any action in Monday night’s 27-24 comeback win at Tennessee, and made a rather conspicuous retreat to the locker room (and subsequently, the parking lot). Proving they’re every bit as sensitive as the so-called musicians I routinely walk out on, the Steelers waived Blount earlier today, a roster move chronicled with some lip-licking by the Post-Gazette’s Ray Fittipaldo :
“You know what, man, we have a good team,” said center and team captain Maurkice Pouncey. “If you don’t want to be here, don’t be here. At the end of the day you have your decision to make as a man, and he made it.”
Pouncey said Blount’s release was “a blessing in disguise.”
“We’re fine,” Pouncey said. “We have our starting running back. It’s probably a good thing that it happened. At the end of the day, if it was a cancer, he ended up leaving on his own. That’s a blessing for us. At the end of the day, we’re good. We don’t need him.”
Others echoed Pouncey’s sentiments. Star receiver Antonio Brown said the Steelers have a tradition to uphold and there is a “zero tolerance” policy for selfishness.
On his weekly radio show on 93.7 The Fan, quarterback and team captain Ben Roethlisberger said he did not want to rush to judgment on the situation and wanted to learn more facts. If true, however, he said “it is disturbing.”