Ben Roethlisberger played from 2004 to 2021 and retired as the NFL’s most-sacked quarterback, though he’s gladly given that record up to Tom Brady. Still, Roethlisberger is one of the most-hit quarterbacks in NFL history due to his tenure and style of play, a big body defenders knew they needed to get square shots on lest Roethlisberger shrug them off, break the tackle, and extend the play.
Though Roethlisberger has mentioned the story before, on the latest episode of his Footbahlin podcast with guest T.J. Watt, he went into detail about the hardest NFL hit he ever absorbed. It came against the Baltimore Ravens but wasn’t dished out by Terrell Suggs or Haloti Ngata punching him in the nose. Instead, it happened when Bart Scott hit him in 2006.
“I remember Bart Scott,” Roethlisberger told Watt and co-host Spencer. “Bart came around his left, our right side. Willie Parker, love you to death, but Willie went left instead of right to pick him up. So I thought he was picked up. I was looking left. And he hit me in my chest. And everything went slow motion from there. I felt my body get lifted off the ground. I saw my feet go up Level One, Level Two, there’s the sky. Hit the ground…it was all body weight and everything.”
A picture is worth a thousand words so a video is good for a couple of winces, I’m sure. Here’s a look at the nasty hit.
Roethlisberger and the Steelers were tormented by the Ravens that day, losing 27-0. As if the Scott hit alone was bad enough, Roethlisberger was sacked an absurd nine times that day. You can see Parker go the wrong way and as Roethlisberger details, his legs fly up into the air as he gets drilled to the ground.
“Bart wasn’t the biggest. But Bart was that perfect size of speed and size,” Roethlisberger said. “He hit me so hard and I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I’m alive’…that was the hardest I ever got hit. And I laid there because it hurt really bad. But I didn’t miss a play.”
Though Scott’s was the hardest, Roethlisberger took plenty of wallops from the Ravens over the years. For his career, 62 of his 554 sacks were against the Ravens, more than 11%, and they were the most sacks he endured from any one team, edging out the Bengals by two.
Moments like those summed up the Steelers/Ravens rivalry, which really began to heat up around that time. The rivalry had always been good in the late 90s through the early portion of the 2000s, the Ravens winning a Super Bowl with a historically good defense. But it wasn’t until around this time that both teams began to be on the same level as Super Bowl contenders. It wasn’t the Steelers’ year in 2006 as they suffered a Super Bowl hangover, but quickly regrouped the following year.
Roethlisberger asked Watt about the hardest hit he dished out in his career. He said it came in college at Wisconsin against Penn State QB Trace McSorley.
“It was a hit where you heard a noise and it was like, ‘oh, he’s probably not coming back out.'”
Here’s McSorley talking about the hit in a 2022 interview with a clip of it in the video.
Check out the full episode of Roethlisberger’s latest podcast below.
