The Pittsburgh Steelers have had a tough time maintaining adaquate quarterback play since the end of Ben Roethlisberger's NFL career. With five starting quarterbacks in the three full seasons without Roethlisberger, the Steelers will enter this season with a new room of quarterbacks, only Mason Rudolph having played in the system previously.
Along with Rudolph, Skylar Thompson and rookie Will Howard will lead the team for the coming season.
With a relatively unimpressive quarterback room at face value, the new comments by ESPN's Dan Graziano seem confounding. Graziano believes that the Steelers did not like any options in the offseason, and that includes Aaron Rodgers, who they have been in pursuit of for a long while.
"I don't get that sense. I think if you got the Steelers and you gave them truth serum, what they would tell you is we didn't really like any of the options that were available at quarterback this off season, including Aaron Rodgers," Graziano said. "So we're just kind of going with what we ended up being left with. Like, they didn't feel like spending more on Justin Fields than the Jets did. They didn't feel like bringing Russell Wilson back. They didn't feel, for whatever reason, like playing on Sam Darnold in free agency or drafting a quarterback in the first five rounds.
After being linked to a plethora of quarterbacks throughout the offseason, the thought that they were not interested in any quarterback would be tough to understand due to their relative lack of success at the position. Despite this being both a weak draft and free agent class for quarterbacks, there were certainly some standouts in both, including Sam Darnold and Jaxson Dart. Now, the Steelers will go into next season likely banking on the fact that the upcoming draft will be better, despite many of the quarterbacks being quite young.
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