You might recall back during the draft process that the Pittsburgh Steelers brought in a couple of quarterbacks for pre-draft visits. One of them, Joshua Dobbs, they ended up drafting. The other—Patrick Mahomes—ended up being selected in the top half of the first round, well before Pittsburgh could get to them.
Both of them did get the opportunity to meet and speak with Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger while they were in the facility. Evidently, though, they were not the only rookie quarterbacks to make the acquaintance of the two-time Super Bowl champion, or to stay in touch and seek advice.
Mitchell Trubisky, who was selected by the Bears with the second-overall draft pick, recently appeared on ESPN radio to discuss his transition from the college level to the pros, tackling a number of subjects, one of which was the number of veteran quarterbacks he had spoken to.
But he thought the best piece of advice that he got from all of them—including Peyton Manning and others—came from the Steelers’ signal caller himself.
“We have the same agent so I was able to throw with him when I was preparing for the draft”, Trubisky noted. That tends to be an advantage. “He said, ‘you just have to go in there and be yourself. You have to be confident in your abilities and what you bring to the table. And your career is going to go how you want it to go’”.
Even Trubisky acknowledges that “it sounds cliché, but I think that really resonated with me because you have to take charge of your future, your plan, and what you want to bring to an organization”, he said. “You have to go in there, be confident, shape things the way you want them to go and have a voice and then people will follow. That was huge for me”.
It has been a somewhat interesting development for Roethlisberger over the course of the past five years to find himself in this mentoring role that he was able to avoid for so many years. Throughout the majority of his career, the Steelers stuck him with veteran quarterbacks as backups upon which he could lean.
That changed in 2013 when they let Charlie Batch and Byron Leftwich do and drafted Landry Jones. Now he has both Jones and Dobbs behind him, learning from him and trying to watch him and learn from him. And that is a role that he has embraced.
We saw that during the pre-draft process with his impromptu visits with the quarterbacks that the Steelers brought in, and we see that now with Trubisky recounting his own conversation with Roethlisberger.
He has certainly come a long way on a personal level even from just a handful of years ago, both in the realm of football and entirely off the field. So it is no surprise to hear from younger quarterbacks about advice he may have passed on, when once it might have seemed shocking.
