Joey Porter Sr says Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback he won a Super Bowl with at the Pittsburgh Steelers, is not “a good person”.
Porter was speaking on a podcast during Super Bowl week when he made the comments. He and Roethlisberger won Super Bowl XL with Pittsburgh at the end of the 2005 season.
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Porter said Roethlisberger and another former Steeler, James Harrison, had broken a code by criticizing Mike Tomlin, who departed as Pittsburgh head coach in January after 19 seasons in charge, on their own podcasts.
Related: Ben Roethlisberger was easy to admire as a quarterback, but not as a man
“[Harrison] broke the brotherhood,” Porter said on Cameron Heyward’s Not Just Football podcast. “Then [Roethlisberger] definitely broke the brotherhood. Out of anybody that should talk, he should never grab a microphone and really talk Steeler business. Because if we talk Steelers business, his ass is foul of all foul. The shit that he did is foul of all foul. He’s not a good teammate.
“Won the Super Bowl with him, but the person, he’s just not a good teammate. He knows that. Anybody in the Steelers building knows that, but we protected him because I’ve only won one Super Bowl and that was my quarterback. So do I love my quarterback? Yeah, but is he a good person? No.”
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Porter backed up his comments by saying that Roethlisberger had once refused to sign memorabilia for his teammates’ families.
“He was telling people, ‘No, I’m not going to sign that,’” Porter said. “So once he did that, who they come and tell? The captain. When he first did it to Chris Hoke, I was like, ‘Damn, that’s messed up, man.’ I grabbed it from Hoke, took it over there and told him to sign it. But then when he did that to Aaron Smith, now I got to have a meeting [with Roethlisberger]. Like, you’re a rookie, you’re a young guy.
“You can’t tell my vets you’re too cool to sign for my vets. Who the hell is too cool to sign for your teammate? I’m not a fan.”
Porter added that Roethlisberger was appointed Steelers team captain, rather than being voted in by his fellow players.
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“He came in the era where they just gave you the ‘C’ – because if he wasn’t a captain, he’d probably have a hissy fit. But nobody’s going to vote for him as captain because he don’t have no captain quality,” Porter said.
Before Tomlin’s departure from the Steelers, Roethlisberger suggested his former coach should be fired, saying it was time for the team to “clean house”.
Roethlisberger later backtracked on the comments. “Just because I said there’s a time for some new things, that’s just saying that I think Coach Tomlin, if he wants to move on, he has every right to move on – it’s not they should,” he said.
Porter is not the only teammate to criticize Roethlisberger. After the quarterback was suspended for violating the NFL’s personal conduct policy after allegations of sexual assault, for which Roethlisberger was never criminally charged, Steelers receiver Hines Ward said the “suspension is justified”. Current Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph also appeared to back Porter’s comments on social media.
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Porter left the Steelers in 2007 and Roethlisberger admitted in 2010 that he had not behaved well in the past.
“I got caught up being Big Ben the whole time,” Roethlisberger said. “I lost track of who Ben Roethlisberger was. It’s not something I’m proud of … I was gaining everything, but I was losing a lot of who I was raised to be.”
Porter was a three-time All Pro linebacker during his time with the Steelers, and has retained links with the team in retirement. He was their outside linebackers coach from 2015 to 2018, and his son Joey Jr has played cornerback for the team since they drafted him in 2023.
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