The Pittsburgh Steelers are hoping injured starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger will be able to play Sunday in the team’s AFC Divisional Round playoff game against the Denver Broncos after suffering a sprained right shoulder late Saturdays win over the Cincinnati Bengals. As expected, Roethlisberger didn’t practice Wednesday and he’s unsure when he’ll resume throwing again.
According to Mike Prisuta of steelers.com on Twitter, he was told Wednesday in the Steelers locker room that Roethlisberger’s chances of playing Sunday in Denver are currently 50-50 and that it might come down to how he looks in pregame warmups as to whether or not he plays against the Broncos.
That’s not overly surprising considering the nature of the injury and especially if Roethlisberger isn’t able to throw much during the week. More than anything else, the team will want to make sure he’ll be able to throw the football deep before giving him the green light to play Sunday.
At this point, we should probably not expect Roethlisberger to practice much, if any, this week and in all likelihood, he will be listed as questionable on the Friday injury report as a result. The good news is that the game in Denver won’t kickoff until later in the afternoon on Sunday and by that time Roethlisberger will have had a full week to rest his injured shoulder.
In the meantime, backup quarterback Landry Jones will get quite a bit of work this week in practice with the Steelers first-team offense and he certainly needs it judging by the limited playing time that he received Saturday night while temporarily relieving Roethlisberger until he returned for the final offensive possession.
