And yet Pead outlasted both Richardson and Stacy. And if not for the knee injury last year MAY HAVE finally taken hold of the opportunity and we would never have seen Mason.
The biggest issue Pead had with this team was his "lone wolf" attitude towards his teammates. He was not well liked and it carried over to the meeting rooms which in turn translated into lack of playing time. He busted his ass on special teams in an effort to rectify his perceived lack of commitment. But when the knee injury occurred his days were numbered.
That their staff kept bringing him back was a testament to his talent. Even coming off the injury he was the most athletic and talented RB on the roster not named Gurley.
I for one will not be the least bit surprised to see him flourish in Pittsburgh. And wish him nothing but good luck.
Outlasting them isn't much of an award, even such they still showed that they could play better, safer and consistently better than he could. The fact that they were easily replaced is just a further testament to how poorly Pead performed, this was a team desperate for anything to stick after Jackson and this guy couldn't outperform Stacy, Cunningham or Richardson, guys who are supposedly vastly inferior to him and he's definitely nowhere near beating Mason and Gurley.
Also at the bolded, you say that yet he blames the team for him not getting success, which is the point of this. Nobody's saying he doesn't have talent, but nobody's going to be impressed with sour grapes when he did things like this and got brought back for three years to try to rectify it and never could. Fisher didn't make him a butterfingers, Fisher didn't make him get suspended. The one year it looked like things were going to come together he gets injured, which isn't his fault, but still not the fault of coaching either. This is the NFL, you don't get chances for free, you don't get chances just because you have potential. You earn them, a lot of good players who bust their ass on every play and didn't make the same amount of mistakes fall to the wayside all the time, what makes Pead so special that he deserves even more? How many years were we supposed to give him anyways? Four, Five, Six? He had plenty of time to find his groove. Eventually we found our feature back and a good complement and he became superfluous, that's just how the NFL is and we shouldn't shed any tears over it, should we continue to flounder when our O was already bad just to wait for him?
And onto his special teams play, he was a good gunner, but that's really it. He wasn't anything spectacular on kick return, and he made boneheaded plays. Marquez spelled his doom when he could gun and not foolishly mess up kickoffs and then laugh about it in the face of the person who's kick he ruined.
Flourishing in Pittsburgh isn't going to change the fact that he's sour grapes and saying he didn't get a chance shows a lack of self awareness, which I don't doubt factored into his inability to stick here. Nobody's going to be impressed by that, and they shouldn't be.
