Brian Urlacher says culture is the reason Steelers can keep veteran leaders longer than other organizations “My deal was the first time I ever became a free agent. They never let me get that far. So they don’t make an offer. My agents, they’re talking a little bit. My agent goes, ‘What do you guys want to do here?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, make an offer. Present something to us, and we’ll go from there.’ So we do that.” “He comes back and says, ‘We’re going to give him…’ and they wait a long time. And this is not just a knock on that guy, but the Bears could’ve said, ‘Hey, look, give him this. Offer him this. We want him here.’ Give him the Kobe deal.” “It wasn’t about the money for me either, man. I was just pissed off with the way they handled it. It was kind of a slap in the face, the way the dude went about it. And the Bears could’ve stepped in and said, ‘Hey, you know…’ You know who does that a lot with their players? The Steelers.” “They keep them one or two years, maybe longer than they should. But they understand what those players mean to their organization, and they keep them. They keep them around.” “Heath Miller played extra years. Troy Polamalu, extra years. Cam Heyward. So they keep these guys because they know what they mean to the Culture. Yeah. The culture of the team.” “And maybe I wasn’t. Maybe they didn’t think I was that. And that’s fine with me. But then they fired Lovie. So I was like, ‘Fuck, do I want to go back there?’ On the deal they offered me, I’m like, ‘I don’t want to play for anyone else but Lovie.’ So I just decided to retire instead.”