Sharpe Reiterates Longstanding Dislike (Pre-2003 Meeting)

On Sept. 17, 2003, in a pregame wire item and subsequent coverage, Shannon Sharpe addressed questions about his relationship with Bill Romanowski and said, "I don't know if I disliked him, or if I disliked the things that he did," explicitly linking their 2002 sideline incident to longer-standing personal concerns from their time as teammates [18][19]. The remark was part of pregame media ahead of a Broncos–Raiders matchup and served as a public reminder that the Nov. 11, 2002 elbow injury and Romanowski's December comments had not settled their differences in the eyes of the Broncos veteran [15][18][19]. Coverage noted the continuity between their teammate-era friction and the subsequent on-field incident, framing Sharpe's comments as a sustained, on-the-record grievance rather than a single-game reaction [18][19].

Sharpe's Sept. 2003 on-record statement matters because it confirmed the dispute was more than an isolated game injury; it tied the sideline altercation to a longer pattern of interpersonal discomfort and kept the issue in contemporary pregame narratives. That sustained public commentary affected how beat writers and fans framed future Broncos–Raiders meetings involving either man [18][19].

Following the Sept. 2003 remarks there is routine game and feature coverage but no widely reported reconciliation in the sources cited here. The exchange reinforced a documented personal rift that, in available reporting, remained unresolved after that season [18][19][20].