Like it or not — and most people in these parts don’t like it, but, if they’re honest, they respect it — The Team Over East, the Browns’ rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers, have a certain manner with which they conduct themselves and do business.

It’s called  “The Steelers Way,” which was, in large part, according to the club’s president and primary owner, and graduate of Gilmour Academy in the Cleveland suburb of Gates Mills, Art Rooney II, “The Browns Way,” because, when the Browns were a model franchise decades ago, “We would watch what they did and try to copy it if we could.”

The Steelers do what they do — and what they’ve done for a long time — because the measured, conservative, time-honored approach works for them. They don’t veer off it much, and they don’t put up with nonsense, foolishness and other things that would get in the way of that effort, and winning games.

I say all this because the Steelers are said to have an interest in free-agent quarterback Aaron Rodgers, late of the New York Jets, and even later of the Green Bay Packers.

Perhaps it is really true that the Steelers have an interest in Rodgers because they need to figure out their quarterback situation. I can’t believe it will go any further than that. It may be just a courtesy interview. For when they talk with him, they will find what everybody in the NFL, and in the free world as well, already knows is that he is, in a term that was popular back in the day, “a head case.”

That fits into the parameters of “The Steelers Way” about as well as a violent thunderstorm fits into plans for a picnic.

Rodgers has been “different” for a long time. When he was putting up huge numbers, the Packers would tolerate his antics. But now that he isn’t, no one is willing to turn a blind eye to it. It just isn’t worth it, for having a player like that in the locker room is toxic.

That’s one of the lessons teams have learned in the 32 years that unrestricted free agency like we know it today has existed, and it is that this is not fantasy football. A player has to fit in with your team
in every way, shape and form, on and off the field.

Steve King