Did The Steelers Almost Trade Ben Roethlisberger?
Ben Roethlisberger hung up the cleats today announcing his retirement via an emotional video on social media. Big Ben will go down as a legend winning two Super Bowls for the team that drafted him way back in 2004. Oddly enough, that almost didn’t happen. Did the Steelers almost trade Big Ben prior to him winning those championships? Maybe…
A recent report from The Athletic indicates that the 49ers had a trade lined up for Big Ben. Their head coach at the time, Mike Singletary, vetoed the deal because of Roethlisberger’s character concerns:
“That’s what the Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker claimed in a conversation with The Athletic’s Dan Pompei. According to Singletary, the 49ers had a deal in place with the Steelers to acquire Ben Roethlisberger back in 2009. But Singletary, who was San Francisco’s head coach at the time, prevented the blockbuster deal from going down. A civil suit accusing Roethlisberger of sexual assault was filed in July of that year.”
“I had been telling the team I wanted a team of character,” Singletary told Pompei. “I felt I had to be true to that. But if I could do it again, I’d do it differently.”
Of course, this is only telling one side of the story. At the end of the day, Singletary probably didn’t have final say in San Francisco. If ownership and or Trent Baalke wanted to pull the trigger on the deal, it probably would have gotten done. Maybe Singletary swayed it from happening but we can’t really suggest he was the main guy blocking the deal. Let’s maybe consider the source on this.
We also don’t have any details from the Steelers side of things. This is an organization that historically is really good to their own. They don’t make rash decisions when it comes to firing coaches. A quarterback that they picked in the first round probably wasn’t going to get dumped in a nonsense trade.
