Ben Roethlisberger suffers injury that will impact Week 3 preparation
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is dealing with an injury heading into Week 3. Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin told reporters on Tuesday that Roethlisberger has a left pec injury, and that it will likely impact his preparation heading into the Steelers’ matchup against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Tomlin said that he wasn’t sure when Roethlisberger suffered the injury, per Around the NFL’s Kevin Patra. Mason Rudolph and Dwayne Haskins sit behind Roethlisberger on the depth chart.
“We’d better be ready to be adjustable,” Tomlin said.
Roethlisberger is in the 18th season of his career with the Steelers
The Steelers made Roethlisberger their franchise quarterback in 2004, selecting him with the 11th overall pick in the 2004 NFL Draft. He has played in 235 games over the course of his career, with a record of 157-75-1. Roethlisberger has 60,831 passing yards with 398 touchdowns and 202 interceptions.
While Roethlisberger is one of the NFL’s most experienced quarterbacks, and he has put up good numbers in his career, that also means that he is one of the oldest players in the league. He isn’t able to bounce back from being consistently hit and sacked as well as he used to. Roethlisberger has been sacked twice in each of the Steelers’ first two games of the season. He was hit 10 times in Sunday’s loss to the Las Vegas Raiders. In his career, Roethlisberger has been sacked 520 times.
Roethlisberger is just two years removed from a major injury
Roethlisberger played in just two games during the 2019 season due to a serious elbow injury. He underwent surgery and missed the remainder of the season. Roethlisberger was able to play in 15 games last season. But earlier in this preseason he admitted that maybe he wasn’t feeling as good as he thought he was during the 2020 season.
“I think last year I said this a few times: my arm felt great,” Roethlisberger said. “It felt really good coming off that surgery. But feeling it now and comparing it to last year, maybe it wasn’t as good then as it feels now. I was only a year removed from a pretty major surgery on a part of the body that I make my living off of.”
As he gets closer to retirement, Roethlisberger is just trying to take things one year at a time with the Steelers.
“I think when you get to this point in your career, you have to take it one at a time,” Roethlisberger said in the preseason. “You’ve got to give this season everything that you have. I know I’ve said it before. Nothing is promised to us. So I’m just going to give everything I have to this season and do what we can from there.”