This year, Aaron Rodgers will become the latest successor to Ben Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh. And Roethlisberger believes it will be a one-year arrangement.
“I don’t think he’s got much more after this year,” Roethlisberger said on his Footbahlin with Ben Roethlisberger podcast, via Andrew Vasquez of USA Today. “I think this might be it for him — personally. I have no reason — you could ask, ‘Well, how do you know?’ I don’t know. I’m just guessing in terms of you coming off an Achilles [tear]. Coming off my elbow [injury], my first year back I felt like I was 100. I wasn’t even — you don’t realize you’re not 100 until the next year when you are 100.”
Rodgers started all 17 games in 2024, a year after suffering a torn Achilles tendon on the fourth play of the first game of the season.
“He’s going to feel better, but it doesn’t mean that he’s going to have two or three years left,” Roethlisberger said. “I think this might be his last go.”
Roethlisberger is hardly going out on a limb. Not many quarterbacks have played deep into their 40s. Rodgers turns 42 in December. (Roethlisberger retired at 39.)
While he hasn’t said it, Rodgers’s main objective seems to be authoring a final chapter that has a better ending than his two-year detour to New York. For him, making the playoffs would do the trick.
For the Steelers, winning a playoff game seems to be the bare minimum to make the experiment a success. That’s something the team didn’t do in any of Roethlisberger’s five final seasons in football — or in the three since he retired.
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