Good article about Roethlisberger from the Chicago Sun Times. Lets go Packers!!

FORT WORTH, Texas — Ben Roethlisberger could end up on the injured list with strained facial muscles. The guy smiled so much Monday you would have thought he was Miss Texas.

At times, the smile looked as forced as a pass into double *coverage. At other times, it looked as if there were defiance in it. Once or twice, it even looked sincere.

In April, NFL commissioner *Roger Goodell suspended Roethlisberger for six games after a 20-year-old college student accused the Steelers quarterback of sexually harassing her the month before. Goodell acted after prosecutors in Georgia chose not to charge him with any crime. The league eventually cut the *suspension to four games.

And now here Roethlisberger sat, talking to media members about inner peace. He wouldn’t say why he felt such serenity, but let’s take a liberty and call it the Zen of It Could Have Been a Lot Worse.

Somebody asked him whether he felt a sense of redemption by being at Super Bowl XLV, as if his presence in the title game was proof that nothing happened in that nightclub 10 months ago.

“That’s a great reflective question, and the time for reflection is probably after the year,’’ he said. “So for me, I can’t reflect. I’ve got to think about the game.’’

That sort of blow-off answer probably would have been fine if he hadn’t decided a short time later to hang a shingle that read “Role Model.’’

“I want to be a role model,’’ he said. “I want people to look up to me. I like when kids wear my jerseys.’’

Roethlisberger is to role model what Snooki Polizzi is to classy.

Do not pass go . . .

While he was expressing his desire for kids to wear his jersey, you couldn’t find his image on the sides of buildings here or in Dallas. You could see Steelers safety Troy Polamalu’s. You could see Steelers receiver Hines Ward’s. You couldn’t see Roethlisberger’s.

No, the NFL knows whom it wants its role models to be, and Big Ben isn’t one of them.

You can’t blame him for *wanting no part of the Great American Apology Tour, in which celebrities publicly bare their souls and admit their transgressions. It always looks packaged.

But Roethlisberger seems to want to skip a couple steps. From jerk to role model in 10 months? Uh, no. Doesn’t work that way.

Goodell recently said he “doesn’t feel any connection’’ with Roethlisberger, and he’s apparently not alone. Goodell said that when he was deciding the quarterback’s punishment, Roethlisberger’s teammates weren’t exactly rushing to his side.

“I bet two dozen players .  .  . not one, not a single player, went to his defense,’’ Goodell told SI.com. “It wasn’t personal in a sense, but all kinds of stories like, ‘He won’t sign my jersey.’ ”

Roethlisberger disputes Goodell’s numbers.

“I know for a fact that when the commissioner came to training camp to talk, a lot of guys kind of did,’’ he said.

Even former Bear Tank Johnson, who came to the Super Bowl four years ago with all sorts of legal problems on his hands, had teammates and coaches rally around him. You haven’t seen a whole lot of that with Roethlisberger in the last year.

He did open up long enough *Monday to equate life with football.

“We’re all human,’’ he said. “We all make mistakes. It’s how you bounce back from those mistakes. It’s just like a football game. You throw interceptions. You lose a game, you’ve got to bounce back and find a way that it doesn’t happen again. Yeah, absolutely, I think it’s important to see how someone bounces back from those things.’’

There’s a little bit of Jay Cutler here, though I’m not sure how much. Cutler hasn’t done anything that involved a police investigation. But both quarterbacks have image problems. Both can be aloof. Both can seem disconnected with reality.

Winning a potent cure-all

If there’s one thing that Roethlisberger has done, it’s win. No matter what the circumstances might have been in the Georgia nightclub *incident and no matter what Goodell saw that made him suspend Roethlisberger, fans can be a *forgiving bunch when a quarterback wins two Super Bowls.

Go ahead and ask him about whether he has learned anything about putting himself in situations he should avoid. He and thousands of Steelers fans will ignore it.

“Another reflective question,’’ he said. “There’s probably going to be a lot this week. Like I said, reflection is not the thing to do right now.’’

What if you ask him whether he was worried Goodell would take the entire season away from him? I think you know the answer.

“That’s another question that I don’t want to have to think about right now,’’ he said.

Roethlisberger has three more sessions with the media this week, and the inconvenient questions will continue to come. It’s hard to picture him smiling by Friday.

But here’s a question that wasn’t asked Monday: Ben, what day is the news conference in which you’ll reflect on what happened 10 months ago? The day after the Super Bowl?

Didn’t think so.