The Pittsburgh Steelers are now into the regular season, following the most unique offseason in the NFL since at least World War II. While it didn’t involve a player lockout, teams still did not have physical access to their players, though they were at least able to meet with them virtually.
Even training camp looked much different from the norm, and a big part of that was the fact that there will be no games along the way to prepare for. Their first football game of the year was to be the opener against the New York Giants.
As the season progresses, however, there will be a number of questions that arise on a daily basis, and we will do our best to try to raise attention to them as they come along, in an effort to both point them out and to create discussion
Questions like, how will the players who are in new positions this year going to perform? Will the rookies be able to contribute significantly? How will Ben Roethlisberger look—and the other quarterbacks as well? Now, we even have questions about whether or not players will be in quarantine.
These are the sorts of questions among many others that we have been exploring on a daily basis and will continue to do so. Football has become a year-round pastime and there is always a question to be asked, though there is rarely a concrete answer, as I’ve learned in my years of doing this.
Question: Will this be the last time Ben Roethlisberger and Philip Rivers face each other?
Ben Roethlisberger is 38 years old. Philip Rivers is 39 years old. The AFC North just played the AFC South this year, so the Steelers and Colts won’t be guaranteed to play a game against one another again until 2024. That’s assuming Rivers is still with the Colts by 2021.
These two quarterbacks came into the league together in 2004 and have tossed their way into the record books. They both rank in the top 10 all-time in passing yards, completions, and touchdowns (as does Eli Manning, for that matter), cementing them as unquestionably one of the greatest quarterback draft classes of all time.
Could this be the final time that they face off against one another? It’s certainly a possibility. But it’s also possible that they play each other again in a few weeks in the postseason. If both teams finish either first or second in their respective divisions, they will also play each other in 2021—assuming both are still in the league and one the same team.
It’s not as much of a rarity as a Roethlisberger-Manning battle because those two were always in different conferences, who only play once every four years. The Steelers and Chargers played each other nine times since 2004, though Roethlisberger missed some of those games, including last year’s meeting.
