Roethlisberger future unknown

to take up so much of your time. Even when you get home, I try my best to turn it off when I walk in the front door. I think I do a pretty good job of that, but it still consumes you in a way.

“Just all those things combined — being healthy, being able to play catch with my kids. I feel good mentally, I know this new study that came out that 90 percent [of NFL] players’ brains who were studied had CTE.

“There’s a lot of scary things, and I think my wife would be OK if I hung it up, too. But I still love the guys, I still love the game, so it was right for me to come back and give it everything I have this year.”

Roethlisberger insists it was not out of frustration with losing the AFC title game that prompted him to mention a possible retirement two days later in an interview with radio station 93.7 The Fan.

“It had nothing to do with frustration, me saying it. It had to do with other factors in life. I think people assume it was the frustration, but honestly it had nothing to do with that, it was more about other things.”

He says he’s in good shape, his arm is fine, but that he will not commit to playing longer than 2017.

“I feel if I commit to anything past right now, I’m cheating now. I’m looking forward to this season, and I’m going to give it everything I have, and afterwards we’ll sit down and do some [thinking] again.”

He knows that 40-year-old Tom Brady of New England as said he wants to play until he’s 50, and Drew Brees of New Orleans has expressed similar sentiments.

“To each his own and good for him.

“He’s doing it at a very high level obviously, and I know Drew Brees talked about doing it. Each person has priorities in different areas

“Like I said, a big one for me is my family and my kids.”

Ben and Bryant

Wide receiver Martavis Bryant has not yet received the heart-to-heart talk he wants with Roethlisberger, but it apparently will occur.

“He texted me and said ‘Let’s talk.’ I said no problem,” Roethlisberger said Friday in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“We haven’t talked other than he told me he’d love to sit down and chat with me and I’m all for it. I’m looking forward to it actually.”

Bryant said he was unhappy with some things Roethlisberger said publicly a year ago after the NFL suspended the wide receiver for the entire 2016 season for again violating the league’s drug policy.

“We should have a manto-man,” Bryant told ESPN two weeks ago.

“Because some of the things he put out there about me, I kind of didn’t agree with how he did it.

“So I want to sit down and hear his own opinion, manto-man, about why he did that.”

Roethlisberger, in an interview early in training camp a year ago, told the Post-Gazette he was disappointed because he felt Bryant lied to him about his drug use.

“We talked a lot, every day during his suspension we talked,” Roethlisberger said in July 2016. “And then when [the second suspension] happened we talked. As soon as the news broke, I kind of asked him what happened. He said some things that were just kind of disappointing.

“I just think the approach, the denial of everything. Looking me in my eye and denying everything, it’s tough.

“It disappoints you as a man and ]as] a guy who cared so much about him. I obviously care a lot about him as a person and a football player.”

Roethlisberger said at the time he gave up trying to talk to Bryant after the wide receiver did not return messages.

One year later, that part at least seems to have been resolved with Bryant’s text to his quarterback.

Bryant is with the Steelers in training camp but cannot practice until he is fully cleared by the NFL more than 16 months after it suspended him for one year.