Are you ready for your daily health and conditioning update on Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger? I hope so, because Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin provided one on Thursday during a Steelers Nation Unite conference call with fans when asked to do so.
“You know, he’s doing great thus far,” Tomlin said Thursday. “He’s in great physical condition. Rehabilitation, in regard to the injury itself, is going well. I hear nothing but positive reports from that standpoint. There have been no bumps in the road. The fact that there’s an injury and his subsequent surgery happened so early in the season in 2019, it’s probably an asset to him and us as we push into 2020. I think everybody’s comfortable with where things are. We’re excited about him and what he’s going to do for us this year.”
It’s nice that Tomlin basically started his response off by saying that Roethlisberger is in “great physical condition” as it clearly comes off as an obvious dig at Fox Sports NFL analyst Jay Glazer, who recently stirred up the news cycle with some comments he made about the quarterback’s past offseason training and conditioning programs in an online question and answer session on The Athletic. Those comments led to him needing to have a phone conversation with Roethlisberger to explain them.
All we still know about Roethlisberger from a rehab standpoint is that he has resumed throwing several times a week. The Steelers won’t be able to see Roethlisberger at the team facility until after the coronavirus pandemic restrictions are softened some and that might be a while.
For whatever it’s worth, Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster posted a video Thursday of him at Roethlisberger’s house on one of his social media accounts. Roethlisberger, however, was not in the video so we’re left to guess if maybe the quarterback was able to throw some to his wide receiver.
All offseason the reports on Roethlisberger’s surgery have been positive and thus there’s no reason to think that he won’t be ready to practice in some capacity when and if training camp gets underway on time in the middle of July. The Steelers still have four other quarterbacks on their 90-man roster in addition to Roethlisberger and thus there’s a good chance they’ll open training camp with that many as well. Five quarterbacks on the roster at the start of training camp would be a clear indication that Roethlisberger will be eased ever so slowly into some sort of practice regimen, which has probably been the plan all along.
