The willingness to offer bold proclamations from a small sample size is a rampant tendency within sports. But especially when it comes to football, there are only so many opportunities to build up a resume, so two games in the NFL feels far more significant than two in the NBA.
And that’s where we are with sixth-year QB Mason Rudolph, who has done a very commendable job leading the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offense the past two weeks. It’s earned him the right to start in the finale over a now-healthy Kenny Pickett, who took over the starting job in his fifth game as a rookie in 2022.
Set to be a free agent again after this season, fans are already wondering what the future holds for Rudolph, once viewed years ago as the potential heir apparent to Ben Roethlisberger. Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to have little doubt about how it will play out.
“Absolutely he will be offered and brought back as the No. 2 QB after what he has shown”, he wrote in his latest chat session yesterday. “Unless he takes them to the Super Bowl, however, I don’t think there will be an open competition for the starting job at training camp. And even then, I don’t think there will be. Kenny Pickett will be their QB in 2024”.
While many have hypothesized that Rudolph is as eager as could be to get out of Pittsburgh and would jump at any opportunity for an equivalent role on just about any other team, that doesn’t seem to be the impression reporters are now portraying. He’s well-liked in the building by all accounts and vice versa.
“There is no question the Steelers will try to re-sign Rudolph after the season”, Dulac added in response to another commenter, indicating the team has a mind to replace Mitch Trubisky with him. “I’m guessing they will simply give him Trubisky’s contract, which is about $11.5 million over two years”.
One of the most galling narratives to me has been the revisionist history about how great Rudolph has looked over the past two years. If only the team had been fair and honest in its evaluations, the theory goes, he would have been starting all this time.
Not that the numbers ever bore that out. You can go back to Alex Kozora’s training camp stats for 2022 when there was a supposed quarterback competition and compare, also noting that Rudolph was given as many pass attempts as any other quarterback. He didn’t stand out from the group in training camp in 2023, either.
And he was graded lower in the 2022 preseason than both Pickett and Trubisky, the latter of whom completed 70.6 percent of his passes for 283 yards and two touchdowns compared to Rudolph’s 66.7 percent for 220 yards and two touchdowns. Pickett completed 80.6 percent of his passes for 261 yards and three touchdowns. All of them had between 39 and 41 pass attempts. It could hardly have been more equal. None of them threw an interception.
And we know how great Pickett looked in the preseason in 2023, though Rudolph did look better than Trubisky in the preseason this past season.
But while he may not have been oppressed by The Man for the past two years, there’s no question that he is playing the best of the group right now. The Steelers have every reason to want to start him right now and to re-sign him in the offseason. We don’t have to write historical fiction to acknowledge what he’s doing today and pretend it’s always looked like this, if only the right people had been honest with themselves.
