How long will it take William Gay to get over the Steelers’ loss to the Patriots in the AFC championship?
Maybe that question should be asked in the past tense. The cornerback said Monday on the South Side he was over it “by 10 o’clock.”
“You gotta be,” he said.
Gay didn’t express specific reasons why the Steelers were outplayed at Gillette Stadium on Sunday. He simply said, at least four times, some variation on this: The Patriots’ execution and game plan were superior to that of the Steelers.
“We tried to do a lot of things, but the game plan was better than ours, and they executed better than ours,” he said. “That’s what it came down to.”
Is there a silver lining? Maybe, especially for the Steelers’ younger players.
“The young guys, all they know is playoff football,” he said. “So, that lets you go into the offseason hungry and determined next year.”
Those younger Steelers were the subject of plenty of criticism — even from quarterback Ben Roethlisberger — in the wake of the Steelers’ 36-17 loss in Foxborough, Mass.
Gay, 32, who has two years left on his contract, had some advice for the younger players who might be on the receiving end of such scrutiny: Ignore it.
“Don’t pay attention to it,” he said. “It’s simple as that. Just don’t pay attention to it.”
And he doesn’t expect that to be harder for younger players who are perhaps less accustomed to the criticism.
“Football is like life,” he said. “Everybody, I’m pretty sure all of you guys, go through trials and errors, and what do you do? You press forward, right? So age don’t have nothing to do with it.”
Elizabeth Bloom: ebloom@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1750 and Twitter: @BloomPG.
First Published: January 23, 2017, 9:04 p.m.
