In 2012, former NFL safety Myron Rolle was doing everything the Pittsburgh Steelers asked. He showed up, he competed, and by their own account, he was playing well. They cut him anyway, and the way they explained it is what he still remembers.

“How it ended, certainly disappointed,” Rolle said on The Ross Tucker Podcast. “Probably one of the most challenging moments of my life to be released from the Pittsburgh Steelers, and be told by their GM, ‘You’re playing well, but we’re not worried about you, Rolle. Because you can go and be president one day. You can go and be a doctor. You’re going to be fine, you don’t need football.’ I’m like, man, I’m here grinding like these guys, but I’m playing well? That’s not a really good reason to let someone go and then sort of patronize them by saying you could be fine in your other career.”

Rolle never played a regular-season snap in the NFL. The Tennessee Titans drafted him in the sixth round in 2010 (207th overall). It was a steep drop from the first round grade he carried before taking a year off to study at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He moved around the practice squads in Tennessee and Pittsburgh before the Steelers, under GM Kevin Colbert and head coach Mike Tomlin, decided to cut him.

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But before any of that, Rolle was one of the most recruited players in the country. ESPN ranked him the No. 1 high school recruit in the 2006 class, out of the Hun School of Princeton. At Florida State, he finished his degree in just two and a half years, earned AP 3rd-team All-American honors in 2008, and became the only FSU football player to win a Rhodes Scholarship.

Rolle isn’t the first player to speak publicly after a sour exit, though. Barry Sanders retired in 1999, frustrated with the Detroit Lions’ front office and what he saw as the management’s refusal to build a winning team. The difference is that Sanders chose to leave, whereas ereas the Steelers told Rolle to go, and then handed a consolation speech on the way out.

After football, Rolle enrolled at Florida State College of Medicine, graduated in 2017, completed his neurosurgery residency at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, and finished a pediatric fellowship at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. He now practices at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Orlando. The GM who told him he could be a doctor was right. Rolle just didn’t need the reassurance.

Myron Rolle also has a specific theory for why Pittsburgh really let him go. The league was absorbing the first serious waves of the CTE crisis in 2012. A Rhodes Scholar getting his brain damaged was a headline no front office would have wanted. Rolle got managed out, not cut.

“If something had happened to me where I was no longer able to fulfill that dream [to be a surgeon], then it would be a terrible media hit for the NFL,” Rolle had said. “It’s a league that wants to protect its image at all costs.”

Not every player who left Pittsburgh carried that bitterness out the door. One former Steeler, cut with far less fanfare than Rolle, came away saying the exact opposite.

“Pittsburgh is the best organization.”

Derwin Gray was a seventh-round pick in 2019, 219th overall out of Maryland. He spent his rookie year on Pittsburgh’s practice squad, appeared in just five games in 2020, and the team waived him on December 26 that year. But even with that short stint, Pittsburgh remained at the top of his list.

“Pittsburgh was the best team I ever played for. And it still is today,” Gray said recently on The Katie Black Show. “Pittsburgh is the best organization. It had a lot of veteran people there. When I say veteran, not just veterans on the field, but veterans off the field. They took care of their bodies. The way they treated their wives. They way they actually would just be loyal to not just themselves or the game, but loyal to their family.”

Gray’s post-Steelers journey was a testament to perseverance, taking him from brief NFL stints with the Jaguars and Titans to championship glory in the alternative football landscape, where he won back-to-back titles with the USFL’s (later UFL) Birmingham Stallions before moving to the CFL.

Myron Rolle became a neurosurgeon. Derwin Gray won championships after the NFL was done with him. The Steelers cut both and moved on. Neither man is wrong about what he experienced; they just met a different organization on the way out.