BUFFALO — The Steelers could not have been happy with their 38-3 loss to the Buffalo Bills, but Arthur Maulet was on a different level of dissatisfaction with the game. After the team entered the locker room, Maulet went off on the rest of his teammates.
He saw people sitting on the sideline laughing. In the locker room, he saw others smiling. For Arthur Maulet, that was enough and he started yelling in the middle of the room. It just so happened to be during Minkah Fitzpatrick’s press conference, and Maulet’s impassioned message even made the All-Pro safety stop for a second to hear what was going on.
“You’ve got to love this s***, bro,” Maulet said. “Real s***, you’re on the sideline and you’ve got guys that are laughing and smiling on the sidelines? We’ve got guys acting like they don’t give a f***. It’s 38-3 and people are laughing on the bench. You have to love this game to play this s***.”
It was a speech that caused everyone’s ears to perk up, and everyone saw it. Maulet was cut eight times in his NFL career, and has earned his way to this point as much as anyone in the NFL. Clearly, there was something that Maulet saw on the sidelines that made him enraged at the response in the locker room. Linebacker Myles Jack saw it all take place, and he applauded Maulet for what he did in the locker room to lay down the law.
“You want that,” Jack said. “Everyone reacts to different scenarios in different ways. You want emotion. You want fire. You want people to be ticked off. If everyone was in here laughing and giggling, it would be embarrassing.”
It will take more than just a motivational speech from Maulet to get things rolling in motion. However, before anything opens on the field, there has to be a level of cohesiveness and solidarity among the players in the locker room. As a veteran voice, Maulet did the right thing to call out what he saw was wrong. This is a game that Pittsburgh will not soon forget in the ugly category as they move forward in the season.