The Pittsburgh Steelers are preparing to face the Cincinnati Bengals for the first time since that tumultuous playoff game last season, but retaliation isn’t on their mind.
Ben Roethlisberger, Le’Veon Bell, and Antonio Brown were all injured against the Bengals, with Roethlisberger and Brown both suffering their injuries in that heated wild-card game. Brown’s concussion ended up costing him the rest of the playoffs. For Roethlisberger, at least, retaliation isn’t on the brain.
“That’s not who we are,” Roethlisberger said, via ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler. “It’s a physical football game and a physical division. That’s what we expect, a physical football game — clean.”
The Steelers don’t really need revenge. They won that playoff game and got so inside the heads of the Bengals that the coaching staff made it a point to stop it from happening again. Pittsburgh succeeded in large part because they were the more composed team, so there’s no reason to change that and jeopardize things now.
