Who will the Pittsburgh Steelers’ starting quarterback be by the start of the regular season—or by the end of it? You could perhaps make a compelling argument for all three of the contestants who have actually received team reps during training camp thus far. But the most experienced of the group remains the favorite, and that would be Mitch Trubisky.
Signed as an unrestricted free agent in March, Trubisky is a former second-overall draft pick now in his sixth season who has had a mixed bag of a career, but many believe he is in the best environment he has been in since entering the league, and he has the support of the Steelers and offensive coordinator Matt Canada.
“I really enjoy him as a person”, he told Jeff Hathhorn of 93.7 The Fan prior to yesterday’s practice. “He’s very much a football student of the game, asks great questions, has great input. I think he has a great way with the players just being himself. He’s comfortable with his leadership skills. He’s fun to be around and I think the players have responded very well to him”.
When speaking about Rudolph, Canada said that the distribution of snaps thus far for the quarterbacks had been based on their resume and what they had done, and Trubisky clearly comes out on top in that regard, the quarterback with the most pedigree and tangible success in the NFL, having taken a couple of teams to the postseason and been named to a Pro Bowl.
Still, most viewers would say that Rudolph has been the best quarterback of the three thus far through three practices, though he is by far the most familiar with what Canada is running, having played in his offense last year and been coached by him since 2020.
The quarterback play thus far through training camp hasn’t exactly inspired visions of championships in anybody’s head, but it’s still the early goings, and we pretty much came into this with the understanding that the onus would be on the defense and the running game to take this 2022 roster as far as it could conceivably go.
It must be said that Trubisky has been embraced as a leader by the players for some time. From the first practice in OTAs, players acknowledged that they were moving forward with him as the first-string quarterback, and that thread has spanned the entirety of the work since then.
Can that change between now and the start of the regular season? Of course it can. But it would probably take something relatively significant to bump him off of being the betting favorite to be out there for the first snap in Acrisure Stadium.
