The Steelers haven’t won a playoff game since 2016, and the evidence of their desperation to change that is staring us in the face. It’s right there on the team’s roster when you filter for position, examining the quarterbacks. They don’t have a depth chart right now—but they also don’t have a starting quarterback. And the reason is because the only one they view as viable is jerking them around.
“I think there is desperation. And look at the depth chart: Mason Rudolph, Skylar Thompson. The desperation is implied”, Mike Florio said of the Steelers on 93.7 The Fan yesterday. “All due respect to those guys, I can’t imagine the Steelers going forward with Mason Rudolph as their starting quarterback in 2025”.
The Steelers have been attempting to get Aaron Rodgers to sign with them for weeks now. They have had an offer on the table for him, which apparently is good enough. Unless there is some practical reason for his delay, it seems he doesn’t have strong feelings for the team.
Yet it doesn’t seem the Steelers believe strongly enough that they can win a playoff game with anyone else available. While waiting for Rodgers, they did sign Mason Rudolph as a safety net. But they signed him in the hopes that he would be the backup, even if it’s not to Rodgers.
“Those guys are there to be the backups to somebody. Whether it’s Rodgers, whether it’s Kirk Cousins, whether it’s Shedeur Sanders, whether it’s somebody else who’s floating around out there, … it can’t be Rudolph 1 and Thompson 2”, Florio said of the Steelers’ quarterback depth chart. “Not if the goal is to get to the playoffs and win a playoff game”.
A vocal contingent of Steelers fans would disagree, or so it seems. Some are excited about the prospect of seeing Mason Rudolph have an opportunity to start a full season. They hold onto the belief that the Steelers jerked him around and didn’t recognize his true potential. Then he went 1-4 with a 9-9 touchdown-to-interception ratio in Tennessee last season.
If any NFL team believed Mason Rudolph was a starting quarterback, he wouldn’t be on the Steelers right now. I think that’s a reasonable enough claim to make, especially if one buys the narratives about his mistreatment and resentment. But he needed the Steelers, and the Steelers need him right now. As much as they don’t want to need him, he is the fallback for their desperation move for Rodgers.
“This is a team that has gone completely out of character with the trade for DK Metcalf, the contract that they gave him”, Florio said. “They’ve never done anything like that in the 50 years I’ve been paying attention to the Pittsburgh Steelers. They want to get to the playoffs and win a playoff game”.
It’s not a question of whether Aaron Rodgers can bring the Steelers closer to winning a playoff game. The only thing that matters at this point is winning, not making progress toward winning. It’s probably not unreasonable that the Steelers believe Rodgers gives them the best shot in 2025. But that doesn’t mean they don’t reek of desperation. And clearly they do, because everybody can smell it.
