Ben Roethlisberger Not Thrilled With Pittsburgh Steelers’ Future
Pittsburgh Steelers legend Ben Roethlisberger seems very disappointed after two back-to-back embarrassing losses.
“Maybe the tradition of the Pittsburgh Steelers is done,” he said on his podcast Footbahlin with Ben Roethlisberger, according to ESPN.
He said this after the Steelers lost to the Arizona Cardinals and the New England Patriots, two of the worst teams in the NFL. These two must-win games would’ve put the Steelers at a comfortable 9-4. Instead, they are 7-6 and technically tied with five other teams competing for the wild card.
Roethlisberger added that he didn’t understand head coach Mike Tomlin’s thought process behind his timeouts against the Patriots last week.
“You can’t afford, in the second half of games, to burn silly timeouts and to not have them late in the game,” Roethlisberger said. “To me, that’s bad coaching.”
The Steelers have a top-10 defense, but have one of the worst offenses in the NFL, averaging just 16.2 points per game. Getting over the Matt Canada firing has left the offense looking lost. To be fair, even when Canada was the offensive coordinator, the offense looked lost, as these struggles have been happening since Week 1.
“Who is grabbing someone by the facemask and saying, ‘That’s not what we do,‘” Roethlisberger said. “Is that happening? Yes, you have guys on defense doing it, but you need guys on other sides of the ball doing it. … You need someone to stand up in that room, on offense, and be like, ‘Hey, this isn’t what it means to wear the black and gold.‘”
The standard just doesn’t seem the same and this team desperately needs a leader. At some point, Kenny Pickett (even though he’s hurt) has to take control or he will be gone. It makes no sense that Tommy DeVito will finish the season with more touchdown passes than him, having currently played half as many games.
Roethlisberger helped continue the legacy of Pittsburgh Steelers football. His successor doesn’t seem capable of doing the job and if Mike Tomlin is not the head coach shortly, this organization could look very different.
