Finding a good quarterback capable of leading your team to a Super Bowl is not easy in the NFL. The only thing that may be more difficult is trying to build a successor to your franchise quarterback while he is still on the squad. Some well-known success stories are Joe Montana and Steve Young, Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers, and Alex Smith and Patrick Mahomes. However, for every successful torch passing, ten failures occur. The Pittsburgh Steelers now have a quarterback combination in Russell Wilson and Justin Fields, and they hope to be one of the lucky few who can transition from one to the next in the future.
“I like Justin Fields, to a certain extent, and I’d be okay with him in certain scenarios where you’ve got an established starter and somebody he can learn from, but like, what’s he gonna learn from Russ?” Garafolo said on former Seattle radio personality Jason Puckett’s podcast. “You’ve got two incomplete guys that you’re trying to shoehorn in here. I don’t get the plan. I don’t think it works incredibly well with what Arthur Smith wants to do offensively. I don’t know what the hell the plan is, and this is one of those, well, it’s the Steelers and they’re gonna find a way to go 9-8. I’m not so sure this time around. This might be my stop, folks.”
There was a report by The Athletic that members of Denver’s coaching staff believed that Wilson having his own office in the team facility, on the second floor where the Broncos’ coaches and executives have their offices, was bad for the the camaraderie of the team.
“The players were always on the first floor; they never really came up to the second floor,” remarked the coach. “If you came up to the second floor as a player, it honestly wasn’t a good thing because you were probably getting released.”
Garafolo does not see Wilson going out of his way to mentor Fields.
“He’s not the type of guy I’d want as a mentor. Sean Payton was furious last year with the way Russ ran the offense, or the lack thereof,” Garafolo stated. “He got this far in his profession. He knows how to play quarterback, but he doesn’t strike me as the type of guy that I’m like, “Boy, show him all the ways of doing things in the NFL.’ That’s not Russ to me. I don’t get it. I don’t get the whole thing.”
To Wilson’s credit, shortly after the Fields’ trade was announced, Wilson welcomed him to Pittsburgh on social media.
“Let’s get it @justnfields! QB room bout to be
,” Wilson wrote on X.
It will be interesting to see if Wilson is a problem at all in the locker room. Some of it appears to be overblown.
Multiple sources told Alan Saunders of Steelers Now that by the end of Wilson’s tenure in Denver, the relationship with Broncos head coach Sean Payton had become toxic.
But was all of that the fault of Wilson, or was he just a part of a few bad situations. In conversations with several sources close to the Broncos and former teammates of Wilson’s, no one was willing to offer a cogent criticism of the behavior of the 35-year-old quarterback.
“All of that is overblown,” one Broncos source told Steelers Now. “He’s a great guy and great in the locker room.”
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