Steelers guard Ramon Foster has seen all of the comments from inside and outside Pittsburgh's locker room and has offered a solution to prevent the public airing of grievances.
Foster took to Twitter on Thursday and asked any current or ex-teammate to reach out to him, center Maurkice Pouncey or anyone "you feel comfortable with" instead of taking his gripes to social media and creating yet another media firestorm.
Foster's plea follows an eventful offseason in Pittsburgh that has featured Antonio Brown and Le'Veon Bell lobbing shots at Ben Roethlisberger and then a well-documented war of words between Brown and receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster.
While it might seem that all of the drama reached a boiling point this week for Foster, NFL Network's Tom Pelissero said Thursday that isn't the case.
"My understanding is that some of the Steelers players leaders felt a statement like this from Ramon Foster today was long overdue," Pelissero relayed on Up to the Minute. "This was not about one specific former Steelers player saying incendiary things. This was not even just about Antonio Brown and some of the shots he's taken against JuJu Smith-Schuster. This goes all the way back to some of the things Le'Veon Bell said after he signed with the Jets about the Steelers organization that he didn't feel as if other players wanted to see him go to the Jets and succeed.
"This is a Steelers team that is empowered by coach Mike Tomlin to police themselves in the locker room. We have also seen general manager Kevin Colbert certainly empower Ben Roethlisberger among others to take care of their own business."
And that seems to be the preferred method moving forward -- for all parties involved. Brown said earlier this week that he was done giving "ammo" to the media, and Foster has laid out a blueprint for how players should handle personal squabbles.
"These media takes might give y'all good traffic on your social media outlets," Foster wrote, "but the guys still in that locker room, who y'all still know personally have to answer for those comments."
