For quite possibly the first time in his NFL career, Pittsburgh Steelers QB Mason Rudolph heard the crowd chanting for him to be put into the game. If there are enough Steelers fans in Indianapolis, it may not be the last time, either.
With QB Kenny Pickett sidelined due to an ankle injury, the Steelers turned to Mitch Trubisky, who has functioned as the direct backup ever since he was demoted from the starting role four games into the 2022 season. It didn’t take long for him to find himself trailing 21-3 to a two-win team. The fans let him know by calling for his backup—Mason Rudolph, who had been inactive all season, dressed only as an emergency third quarterback.
“I’ve been on both sides of that”, Rudolph said of the crowd chanting for him, acknowledging that he did hear them during the game. “It’s cliché, but really all I was trying to do was look at the iPads and help the collective offense make corrections and get ready for the next drive”.
“You really can’t let yourself get caught up in that, because then you lose focus and it affects your mental state”, the sixth-year veteran added. “Obviously, it’s nice to be liked. We have passionate fans, but you can’t let that enter your mind for a second”.
A third-round pick out of Oklahoma State in 2018, Rudolph was drafted by the Steelers because they viewed him as a potential successor to Ben Roethlisberger. They already had Landry Jones as their backup and had just drafted Joshua Dobbs a year earlier.
After spending his rookie year as the third-string quarterback behind Dobbs as Roethlisberger’s backup, Rudolph earned the No. 2 job in 2019. That proved rather significant given Roethlisberger’s season-ending elbow injury in Week Two, thrusting him into a starting role.
That could have gone better. He put up some solid numbers initially, but things spun out of control as the season progressed. Eventually, he was benched in favor of Devlin Hodges, a rookie college free agent who had impressed during the offseason (and prompted the team to trade Dobbs).
Eventually, he re-entered the starting lineup after Hodges struggled, but then was injured himself. After that, he remained Roethlisberger’s backup until the latter retired. With the team signing Trubisky as a free agent last year and then drafting Pickett in the first round, he found himself all the way back to third string.
That surely didn’t sit well with him, but right now, he is sitting in the No. 2 spot behind a struggling backup serving as temporary starter. He has not been this close to playing in quite a while, his last pass coming about two years ago.
But he knows what it’s like to be on the other side of those calls. I’m sure it was nice to hear them go the other way in his favor for a change, but it’s never good when a crowd is calling for the backup to play in a competitive game.
