This week’s Sunday Splash! cycle started a little early, with a flat, predictable Saturday stone that may skip right over to the other side of Lake Obvious.
Via Adam Schefter of ESPN.com, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger “privately has told former teammates and some within the organization that he expects this to be his final season” with the team.
Few if any expected otherwise at this point. Roethlisberger, who turns 40 in March, has looked sluggish and ineffective this season. He wisely pivoted following an early three-game losing streak from trying to extend plays with his feet, because he just can’t do it like he once did.
Overall, he’s been better in recent weeks. He missed a game due to COVID after self-reporting symptoms, and he has been dealing with various injuries, injuries that are harder to recover from based on the wear and tear he has taken over the years and the fact that he’s definitely not a TB12 devotee.
One unnamed source told Schefter that it’s “highly unlikely” that Roethlisberger would play for another team in 2022. That’s not a surprise, either. He’ll be another year older, another year more likely to not be able to make it through the year. Another year closer to permanently losing the race with Father Time. It’s hard to imagine any team handing him the reins next year.
I was surprised he came back for 2021. The Steelers, as the rumors rattling around the NFL go, were surprised, too. They offered him a $4 million reduction in pay with no way to make it back in incentives. That number, as the thinking goes, was selected to be low enough to get him to pass on it but not so low as to be an insult. They were, as the same thinking goes, surprised that he accepted.
When the two sides decided to give it one more go, with the not-so-subtle goal of winning a Bettis-style walk-off Super Bowl, that seemed more delusional than usual, even as blind optimism in the NFL goes. I thought both sides would regret making one last ride together by November. As the first Sunday in December arrives, chances are that team and player would say, if attached to a lie detector test, that they probably should have gone their separate ways.
After the current season, they apparently will. They should. It’s been a Hall of Fame career for Roethlisberger. But it’s time for the Steelers to turn the page. And they need to hope that they can find their next franchise quarterback sooner than they got their last one, because it was 20 long years between Terry Bradshaw and Ben Roethlisberger.
