Bending over doesn’t get any easier as you get older. I’m still in search of a better mattress myself that won’t have me waking up with back pain every day. So I sympathize to some degree with the difficulties Pittsburgh Steelers QB Mitch Trubisky faced while trying to corral an errant snap from C Mason Cole in the second half of Sunday’s game. Former Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger, who is older than me and has been in that situation before, shared his own point of view on the matter.
“Should he have gotten it? Maybe”, he said of the botched snap that, because Trubisky could not locate and secure it in time, led to an Arizona Cardinals takeaway, as he told the DVE Morning Show yesterday. “But as a quarterback, I’m telling you this: the last thing you want to do is look down for a ball”.
And quite frankly, I’m not sure which is worse—the ball that goes over your head, as happened to Roethlisberger in the 2020 playoff loss to the Cleveland Browns on the first play of the game, or between your legs, as happened to Trubisky.
“You have so much going on in front of you. I remember, I would not even be watching the snap. You’re almost catching with your peripheral. You’re kind of looking through the ball. You’re counting on that”, Roethlisberger said.
“When you have to go down, it is one of the most helpless and worst feelings as a quarterback because now you’re down and you’re like, ‘Uh, who’s blitzing? Where did everybody go? Am I about to die? What’s gonna happen?”
My assumption is that very few quarterbacks throughout the history of the game have died as a result of attempting to recover a loose snap, but there’s always a first time for everything, I suppose. And any time you find yourself giving yourself up on the ground in an attempt to recover the ball, you expose yourself.
Going back to the Sunday fumble, it actually serves as a good example. As Trubisky stepped back to try to locate the ball, he began to get his hands on it and bring it up to his body when the first defender got to him, taking him down by the legs and separating him from the ball in the process.
It really is a dangerous play. But it’s also the quarterback’s number one job to protect the football. Trubisky himself took the blame Sunday for not finding a way to secure the ball, though of course Cole also did the same for his role. The quarterback explained that they had a screen called, which requires the linemen to get out of their stance and on the move in a hurry.
“That’s usually when those snaps happen, when your center’s trying to do something. He’s pulling, he’s moving, he’s doing something like that”, Roethlisberger said. “So I’m not blaming Mitch for that. That’s on both of them. Mitch probably still could have had it”.
Ultimately, the snap is supposed to be an automatic function of the offense which neither the center nor the quarterback should have to spend much time thinking about. As long as the center knows when to snap it and the quarterback knows when it’s being snapped, the rest should take care of itself with a blindfold.
In the instances when it’s not, it can quickly wind up becoming a disaster for exactly that reason. A quarterback has so much else to do in those instances that, as Roethlisberger explained, the receiving of the ball is relied upon instinctually as much as anything else. You’re sent into scramble mode—literally—when there’s a hitch in that process.
