The Steelers have known for some time that Ben Roethlisberger would be retiring at the end of the 2021 season. Now, they get an opportunity to do something about it after his announcement Thursday made it official.
With $34 million in available salary cap space and the draft available to use, team president Art Rooney II said Friday the team has positioned itself to do whatever is needed to find its next quarterback.
That could include trading for a veteran, getting one in the draft if they find one they like or signing one in free agency.
"I think you have to take advantage of whatever opportunity you have to get the best quarterback you can find," Rooney said. "You don’t always have the luxury of saying, ‘I want A, B and C’ and go to the grocery store and order a quarterback. We’ll evaluate all the options we have. Certainly, mobile quarterbacks are the wave of the future, so to speak. Having mobility at that position is something that would be desirable. Let’s put it that way. The other thing that’s desirable is having somebody that can read a defense and complete a pass downfield.
"So, (there are) a lot of pieces to the puzzle you have to put together. You don’t always get somebody who meets every criteria you might want. You just have to get the best player and plug him in and put the best players around him and try to put everybody in position to be successful."
One thing he does know is that Mason Rudolph and Dwayne Haskins, Roethlisberger's backups in 2020, will be part of the equation.
Rudolph was signed to a contract extension last offseason at $4 million to return to the Steelers in 2022. The 2018 third-round draft pick has been Roethlisberger's primary backup the past three seasons.
Haskins is slated to be a restricted free agent, but the Steelers will tender him an offer to keep him from going elsewhere. A first-round pick of Washington in 2019, he was released at the end of the 2020 season and signed by the Steelers.
But simply having those two on the roster won't preclude the Steelers from looking to upgrade the position.
"We certainly won’t close any doors at this point. It’s still early in the process," Rooney said. "There will be a lot of doors to open and look through. We have Mason Rudolph and (Dwayne) Haskins on the roster. Those two will be able to compete for the position. But we’ll be look at the other options like any position, to put the best roster on the field and the best person at quarterback for us next year."
And they'll do it with the same offensive coordinator in place.
While the Steelers saw a falloff in offensive production in 2021 from 26 points per game to 20, Rooney didn't seem like he put all of the blame for that on first-year offensive coordinator Matt Canada.
The Steelers regularly started four rookies on offense and had four new starters on their offensive line to go along with an aging quarterback who was no longer as mobile as he had been earlier in his career.
"We had a number of young players, rookie players, playing on offense this year," Rooney conceded. "Look, we didn’t achieve the kind of offense we would have liked to have, but we had some good moments. They kept us in a lot of games. We needed to be more consistent more than anything else. We had a lot of games where we were good for a quarter or a half, but not really for four quarters.
"I think that’s something Matt is going to want to address this offseason. Having so many young players and different pieces coming together, including a coordinator, there were some challenges there. I think we tried to make the best of it, but we didn’t meet all of our goals for sure."
Those goals would include winning the Super Bowl. And though the Steelers made the playoffs at 9-7-1, they didn't hang around long, being beaten 42-21 in the opening round by the Chiefs.
While saying this was, in fact, a transition-type year, Rooney isn't about to change the team's goal of winning a Super Bowl each season.
"It was an up-and-down season. I appreciate the fact our players and coaches kept fighting through the end. It was a crazy last day of the season, obviously," Rooney said. "I’m never going to complain about making the playoffs, but we didn’t reach our goal we ultimately want to get to, so we know we have a lot of work to do."
That will first and foremost include finding a replacement for Roethlisberger. But it also extends to fixing the offensive and defensive lines. The Steelers ranked 29th in the NFL in rushing and dead last in the NFL in stopping the run.
But Rooney pointed to the additions of rookie running back Najee Harris and some of the team's young offensive linemen as things that should help the rushing attack moving forward.
Meanwhile, the defensive issues can be tied to the loss of defensive linemen Stephon Tuitt and Tyson Alualu.
Tuitt didn't play at all in 2021 after having an offseason knee surgery and then losing his brother in a hit-and-run accident immediately after minicamp. He's under contract at a cap hit of $13.975 million for 2022.
Alualu, meanwhile, played just five quarters in 2021 before suffering a broken ankle that ended his season.
The team remains unsure if Tuitt, a 2014 second-round draft pick, is interested in returning and must figure that out before free agency and the draft begin.
"All I can say is that we’ll be evaluating that situation and having a discussion with Stephon here in the next few weeks," Rooney said. "Hopefully (we’ll) be able to say something more definitive in the near future."
But everything else could take a back seat to finding a replacement for Roethlisberger, the team's quarterback since 2004.
That will be the team's top priority in this offseason.
And the team has positioned itself to be aggressive to not only fill that hole, but others, as well, with the cap space they have available.
It's a big change for a team that has typically been right up against the cap each year.
"I do like the fact that maybe have a little more room to work with going into this free agent period and it may allow us to be more aggressive in certain situations," Rooney said. "We have some holes to fill and some cap space is going to allow us to do some of those things as well as in the draft."