The Steelers have a very difficult decision to make at quarterback. Here are the pros and cons of keeping Ben Roethlisberger for the 2021 season.
It didn’t take long for the Steelers to make some significant moves after suffering an embarrassing loss to the Cleveland Browns in the Wild Card round of the playoffs. On January 14th, NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero broke the news that offensive coordinator, Randy Fichtner, would not be returning to Pittsburgh for the 2021 season. Exiting with him was offensive line coach, Shaun Sarrett, and defensive backs coach, Tom Bradley.
While fans will be excited to see who the next offensive coordinator is going to be, Fichtner’s firing immediately made me think of the future of Ben Roethlisberger. Though he obviously hasn’t announced his retirement yet, I can’t imagine him wanting to start over with a new offense and a new coordinator at the age of 39. Perhaps an in-house hiring like Matt Canada can convince him to stay, but we don’t know for sure that the Steelers want him back after his collapse over the final 6 weeks of the season and into the playoffs.
The Steelers scored just 19.6 points per game since Week 12, and they only managed 3 games of 30-plus points all season long. Still, despite their struggles this year, there is a list of both pros and cons for if Roethlisberger decided to stay for one more season.
While my gut tells me that it’s time for Pittsburgh to move on, not everything is going to be easy after moving on from Big Ben. Still, with a $41.25 million cap hit, he will have to make that decision on his own. Here are the pros and cons of keeping Ben Roethlisberger for the 2021 season:
Pros of keeping Ben Roethlisberger
The list of reasons to want to keep Ben Roethlisberger around has dwindled in recent years, but there are still some to point to. In theory, bringing in a young quarterback with less mileage on the tires sounds terrific, but it’s also important to consider how many growing pains go into that process. Unless Pittsburgh is willing to mortgage their draft capital over the next few years, it’s unlikely they will be able to land a quarterback that could put them in a winning situation right away. There’s also no guarantee that whoever they get won’t be replaced after a few years – starting the process all over again.
The Steelers could also go another route with this and stream free agent quarterbacks or trade for a veteran. However, any team willing to give up the quarterback they had probably isn’t going to be good enough to win you a Super Bowl, and there is a reason those other players are in free agency. Worst yet, Pittsburgh could role with Mason Rudolph and there’s a chance they aren’t even a competitive organization with him at the helm.
In addition, Ben is a veteran leader who has been in big situations before. Though his performance against the Browns in the playoffs is one we would like to forget, he knows how to lead a team and he did a good job of doing so in the first half of the season. While he’s nowhere near the player he used to be, he offers stability to an offense that is going to have an incredible amount of turnover this offseason. With Pittsburgh set to lose so many contributors in free agency, you can make a case for wanting to keep Ben around in 2021.
Cons of keeping Ben Roethlisberger
As of now, it seems like it is easy to think of all of the cons of keeping Big Ben around for another season. Again, because of all the money he is counting for against the cap next year, Ben is going to have to walk away on his own terms or Pittsburgh will have to force his hand and save nearly half of his $41.25 million cap hit. But even if they are forced to eat $22.25 million in dead cap space this coming season, according to Over the Cap, it may still be worth it if it means that Roethlisberger isn’t there in 2021.
In 2020, Ben finished as one of the least-efficient quarterbacks in the league in terms of his advanced passing stats, according to PlayerProfiler.com, and he was largely responsible for an offense that couldn’t even muster up 20 points per game over the last six contests.
The reality of the situation is that 2020 was the last real chance Ben Roethlisberger was going to have of getting this team back to the Super Bowl. The Steelers are in a bad way financially and they will be losing a lot of players this offseason – quite likely including JuJu Smith-Schuster and Bud Dupree. Now that Ben will be another year older next season with probably a worse roster, it’s unreasonable to think that he will be much better (if any) than the player we saw in 2020.
Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers both have a very important decision to make about who will be Pittsburgh’s quarterback in 2021. The Hall of Fame passer has been contemplating retirement for a few years, but maybe this time it would be in the best interest of both parties involved if he were to call it quits.