Skip Bayless continues going out of his way to criticize Antonio Brown and Le'Veon Bell. The FOX Sports personality, co-host of Undisputed, recently named embattled Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger as his early favorite for MVP next season, evidently using the offseason departures of both superstar playmakers as chief justification for his pick.
“I’m gonna make [Roethlisberger] my early favorite for MVP…over Tom Brady,” Bayless said, per 247 Sports' Ryan Deardo. “It has become open season on a guy, the last time I checked … he was Offensive Rookie of the Year in the National Football League [back in 2004]. You gotta give him that.
“It’s open season on this quarterback whose played in three Super Bowls and won two of those Super Bowls. And this is a quarterback, open season on him, has been to six Pro Bowls and who last year finished third in the NFL in QBR. Not only that, but he led the NFL In passing yards last year with a career high 5,129 yards. He went over 5,000 passing yards last year and also had a career high 34 touchdown passes. Open season on this guy.”
The impressive statistics Roethlisberger put up last season and his decade-plus history of high-level football are enough by themselves to make the two-time Super Bowl champion a worthy MVP candidate. But Bayless, harping on what he feels is undue criticism levied toward the future Hall of Famer for his questionable leadership tactics, gave away the game while continuing his soliloquy.
“So that guy is just getting annihilated by two malcontents who were not happy with their moment in Pittsburgh as they are leaving town,” he said. “They are shooting and are firing away at Big Ben Roethlisberger, that quarterback that I have detailed.
“Both of those guys, Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell, they will miss being Pittsburgh Steelers. Sooner or later they will miss it. They won’t admit it publicly, but they’ll look back and they’ll say, ‘That was pretty great there, because we had flying circus offense because we had a quarterback who could just shrug off rushers and get us open.'”
Bell held out all of last season after Pittsburgh used the franchise tag on him for the second consecutive year. He signed a four-year, $52 million deal with the New York Jets in free agency last month. Brown, meanwhile, requested a trade in February following a season in which he clashed with Roethlisberger and Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin despite leading the league with 15 touchdown catches. He was dealt to the Oakland Raiders in exchange for third and fifth-round picks on March 10th.
Roethlisberger, meanwhile, came under fire earlier this offseason as the extent of Brown's discontent with Pittsburgh became public. Several former teammates have backed up accounts of Roethlisberger's supposed deficiencies as a locker-room leader, while many prominent voices within the organization, including general manager Kevin Colbert and star receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, have rushed to his defense.
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