Steelers positional grades are mostly disappointing for the 2021 season

The Pittsburgh Steelers made it to the playoffs, but here’s why their positional grades are quite disappointing for their efforts in the 2021 season.

It’s hard to be satisfied with the final outcome of the 2021 season for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Though Mike Tomlin was able to find the playoffs for the second straight year — this time as the newly-added seventh seed — Pittsburgh was blown out by Kansas City in the Wild Card round.

I can hardly say that I’m surprised by what happened in the post-season. Nearly every metric showed that the Steelers were about the 23rd-best team in the NFL this year. Sadly, there’s a talent deficiency on this current roster. This was evident in 2021. Here are my positional grades for Pittsburgh this year:

Steelers quarterbacks: D

Whether you are a Ben Roethlisberger apologist or not, we should all be able to set aside our biases to agree that this was a pretty bad year for the Steelers quarterback. This is not an indictment on anything he did in the past; I am simply evaluating what I saw from him in 2021… and the results were not good.

While Ben managed to earn a respectable 2-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio, this is hardly the makings of a quality quarterback in the NFL. His 6.2 yards per attempt were the lowest of his NFL career (at least 3 games played) and his 3.0 completed air yards per pass attempt was outrageously bad.

All of this equated to an offense with very little firepower, and Roethlisberger couldn’t seem to connect with receivers with any sort of consistency down the field. The results were mostly the same when Mason Rudolph had to step into the game. This is not the way that we would have liked to have seen Ben Roethlisberger hang up his cleats, but it was not a good QB performance this year.