Promising to serve as a “villain” to Baltimore now that he’s donning black and yellow , Patrick Queen already appears to have left an early impression on his new employers.
The Pittsburgh Steelers are adding shades of purple to their ensemble this season: the team added the former Baltimore Raven Queen on a three-year, $41 million contract shortly before picking up fellow former bird DeShon Elliott on a two-year deal.
According to Elliott, Queen himself was partly responsible for his new job, recalling a phone conversation he had with the linebacker before he opted to move on.
“He was like, do you want to become a Steeler?” Elliott recalled in an interview with Missi Matthews of the Steelers’ official site. “I was like, what do you mean? He goes, I was talking to the (general manager), do you want to become a Steeler? I was like, freak yeah, bro, hell yeah, I’ll come play with you; what are you talking about?”
“So the next day, (we) made it happen.”
Queen and Elliott’s respective Baltimore tenures overlapped by two seasons (2020-21) with the former arriving as a first-round pick a couple of years after the safety came in the sixth round.
Having viewed his progress from afar (spending the past two seasons with Detroit and Miami), Elliott was impressed with the way Queen upgraded his professional narrative.
“It’s great to see the man he’s becoming,” Elliott told Matthews. “I met PQ when he was a freaking kid, he was 20, came in first-round out of college, bug-eyed, just happy to be in the NFL, so to see his growth over the years, to see the type of player he’s become, a smashmouth, an aggressive, real-life star linebacker, I’m so proud of him.”
“It’s exciting to be back with him, be on this defense together because I’m an energetic guy on the field, he’s an energetic guy. I think we’re going to bring a lot of life to this defense.”
Queen and Elliott are the latest names to cross lines in the rivalry, a list that includes Le’Veon Bell, James Harrison, Carnell Lake, Alejandro Villanueva, and more. A forearm injury forced him to miss his entire rookie year but Elliott wound up amassing 109 tackles (6 for a loss) and seven pass breakups over three seasons in purple.
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