Since Ben Roethlisberger’s retirement in 2022, six quarterbacks have taken dropbacks for the Pittsburgh Steelers: Russell Wilson, Justin Fields, Kenny Pickett, Mason Rudolph, and Kyle Allen. Presumably, after agreeing on Thursday to a one-year deal and ending a monthslong saga of will he or won’t he, Aaron Rodgers will be the seventh quarterback to try to fill what has been a glaring void at the sport’s most important position.
It feels like the Steelers are back where they were before the turn of the decade, at the tail end of Roethlisberger’s career, with a decent supporting cast surrounding a once-great quarterback with waning physical abilities. I’ll forgive you if you’ve deleted the memories of Roethlisberger’s final two seasons from your brain’s cache. By that point, he had lost most of his arm strength, all of his mobility, and any desire to take a hit. His demands on how the Steelers offense should operate around him were as strong as ever, though. And placating an aging Roethlisberger seemed to take precedence over fielding a productive offense, and the results were predictably bad, if not comical at times.
Even if the quarterbacking was bad, Roethlisberger had earned the right to retire on his terms. He had led the franchise to two Super Bowl titles while breaking numerous passing records along the way. His strong influence over the offense made some sense because when Roethlisberger was at or near the top of his game, it paid dividends on the field. Rodgers is joining the Steelers with an equally impressive career résumé, but none of it was accomplished in Pittsburgh. Given what we know about Rodgers—which is frankly too much at this point—that probably won’t make much of a difference to the quarterback. He will likely demand the same level of control over the offensive scheme that Roethlisberger had over the last decade of his career. And given how the Steelers have been willing to put their offseason plans on hold while Rodgers contemplated retirement after his release from the Jets, it feels likely that he’ll get it. Whether the 41-year-old former MVP is still worthy of that respect will ultimately determine how successful this seemingly doomed partnership will be, and whether this is the move that will pull Pittsburgh out of QB purgatory.
A cursory look at Rodgers’s final 2024 statline might convince you that he’s still got plenty left in the tank. He threw for 3,897 yards with a solid touchdown-to-interception ratio of 28-to-11. Pro Football Focus credited him with 26 “big-time throws” against 12 “turnover-worthy plays,” putting him ahead of Patrick Mahomes, and just outside of the top 10, in both categories. There’s a statistical case that Rodgers’s lone season as the Jets’ starting quarterback wasn’t nearly as bad as you remember. That case would be misleading. The advanced (and more reliable) metrics paint a much more bleak and realistic picture. Rodgers finished 26th in EPA per dropback and 25th in both passing success rate and QBR. Sure, he was playing behind a bad offensive line, which would drag down the numbers of any quarterback, but Rodgers put up bottom-of-the-league numbers even from a clean pocket. Only Tennessee’s Will Levis, who was ultimately benched for Pittsburgh’s current backup, Rudolph, had a lower EPA average on unpressured dropbacks last season, per TruMedia.
The strongest sign that Rodgers is a far cry from the quarterback who won back-to-back MVP awards in 2020 and 2021 can be found in his stats when facing pressure. Nearly a quarter of his pressured dropbacks last season turned into sacks, and he averaged just over 3.1 yards on those plays. A deep dive into his film leads to a similar conclusion: Rodgers is no longer the creative force he was at his peak. When the pocket breaks down, Rodgers breaks down. Even if he manages to escape the rush, the 40-something QB with a surgically repaired Achilles tendon doesn’t pose much of a threat with his legs. What was once a hallmark of his game is his most significant area of weakness. Now, he’s more likely to just tap out on a play that isn’t going as planned. Only Bo Nix threw more checkdowns last season, according to Pro Football Focus; those safe passes may have padded Rodgers’s completion percentage and kept his interception total down, but they were not part of an efficient offense.
The deeper Rodgers got into a play, the worse he played. He was at his best when the ball was coming out of his hand quickly, whether it was on short, timing-based throws or vertical shots to the perimeter, which were often dictated by the pre-snap defensive look. If you watched only a cut-up of Rodgers when he was dealing in quick-game concepts or throwing downfield outside of the numbers, you might come away thinking the guy still has plenty of juice in his arm.
Just don’t watch any of the other throws if you want to hold on to that hope. Rodgers’s loss of downfield precision was most glaring when he attacked the intermediate areas of the field, the type of passes that would show off his accuracy and zip during his MVP-winning days in Green Bay. Last season, on throws aimed 10-to-19 yards downfield and made from a clean pocket, Rodgers’s uncatchable throw rate spiked to 39.6 percent. That’s a 14-point jump from his 2022 season and a 17-point jump compared to 2021. The version of Rodgers who routinely pulled off absurd throws like this seems to no longer exist.
Rodgers has lost a few mph off his fastball and his top running speed, but there are still some qualities the Steelers can conceivably build a productive offense around. He may no longer be a star quarterback capable of elevating a middling supporting cast, but he can still get it done as a game manager thanks to his quick processing and accuracy on throws with a lower degree of difficulty.
There was a time when it felt like even mediocre quarterback play would be enough to get the Steelers over the hump and end Mike Tomlin’s playoff win drought. That’s probably no longer the case. Pittsburgh did reshape its receiving corps over the offseason, shipping malcontent George Pickens off to Dallas and bringing in DK Metcalf and Robert Woods, but that feels like the Alex Jones before-and-after meme, to put it in terms that a guy like Rodgers can appreciate. Pittsburgh also let Najee Harris, a first-round pick, walk in free agency after a disappointing stint as the team’s lead running back and will seemingly give his former backup, Jaylen Warren, the first crack at replacing him—unless third-round rookie Kaleb Johnson beats Warren out for the job. The young offensive line should be improved in 2025, but it did lose a key contributor in offensive tackle Dan Moore to free agency. The tight end group, led by Pat Freiermuth and Darnell Washington, could be another strength that offensive coordinator Arthur Smith will lean on heavily, but this isn’t exactly a world-beating group of skill players the Steelers are putting around Rodgers. And nobody would be surprised if Rodgers eventually forces a trade for one of his buddies, and Randall Cobb is getting third-down targets by November.
It’s not a given that Pittsburgh’s defense will be a strength in 2025, either. Not after the unit imploded down the stretch last season, with stars T.J. Watt and Cam Heyward throwing not-so-veiled shots at their teammates. As impotent as the offense was in key games down the stretch, the defense didn’t fare much better, giving up 38 points to the Bengals, 27 to the Eagles, 34 to the Ravens, and 29 to the Chiefs before Baltimore ran them off the field in a 28-14 loss in the wild-card round. The team did use a first-round pick on defensive end Derrick Harmon and brought in veteran cornerback Darius Slay to play opposite of Joey Porter Jr., but Harmon is just a rookie, and Slay is well past his prime.
The roster is no longer just a quarterback away. And if Rodgers is no longer a quarterback who can elevate what’s around him—and all of the evidence suggests this is the case—it will be on the coaching staff to carry out that job. Whether Smith’s play calling is good enough to turn Rodgers into a productive quarterback again remains to be seen, but Smith does have a track record of getting the most out of his quarterbacks. In Tennessee, he rejuvenated Ryan Tannehill’s career (with a lot of help from Derrick Henry). The team results weren’t good in Atlanta, but he got efficient quarterback play from Marcus Mariota. And his most impressive feat to date may have been extracting mediocre results from Wilson and Fields last season.
But Smith’s brand of offense, built around heavy personnel groups, condensed alignments, and sequenced play calling, isn’t what Rodgers has preferred throughout his career, even if he’ll find it familiar. Smith worked under Matt LaFleur in Tennessee before LaFleur left to take the Packers job. While there are some differences between Smith’s and LaFleur’s offenses, the general structure is the same and Rodgers played some of the best ball of his career in LaFleur’s version of the scheme. But it took some time for Rodgers and LaFleur to find the right balance between the scheme and what made the quarterback most comfortable. And there was some initial tension as Rodgers advocated for more control at the line of scrimmage. “The audible thing,” as LaFleur referred to it, was the big hurdle the two had to clear.
“I don’t think you want to ask me to turn off 11 years [of recognizing defenses]. … It’s just the other stuff that really not many people in this league can do,” Rodgers said during the 2019 offseason. “That’s not like a humblebrag or anything; that’s just a fact. There aren’t many people that can do at the line of scrimmage what I’ve done over the years. … There are a few of us who’ve just done it; it’s kind of second nature. And that’s just the icing on the cake for what I can do in this offense.”
LaFleur seemed to agree—despite his reluctance to give Rodgers full control of the offense. “We’re running a system I first picked up while working with Kyle [Shanahan] in Houston a decade ago, and we’ve never really had a quarterback who’s had complete freedom to change plays at the line, because that’s not really the way the offense is set up,” LaFleur said back in 2019. “But, I mean, this is Aaron Rodgers. He’s had a lot of freedom to make those calls, and deservedly so.”
At the time, “but it’s Aaron Rodgers” was a convincing enough argument to make significant alterations to a successful offensive scheme. That is no longer the case in 2025. As we saw in New York, where the veteran quarterback acted as shadow offensive coordinator while his buddy Nathaniel Hackett held the official title, the Aaron Rodgers Offense doesn’t work like it used to. If Rodgers intends to bring his ideal scheme to Pittsburgh, we can just fast-forward through these next six months and get right to the inevitable breakup.
Having lived through the final years of Roethlisberger’s career, Tomlin and the Steelers should already know how things will end if they allow Rodgers to shape the offense to his liking. Maybe Tomlin is the coach who finally pushes back against the future Hall of Famer and gets him to fall in line, but he wasn’t able to do it with Roethlisberger. For this to work, it will be up to Rodgers to recognize that he’s no longer that guy, which will require a level of humility he has yet to show in his career. Tomlin has pulled off some impressive coaching jobs throughout his time in Pittsburgh. Getting Rodgers to fall in line and run the offense as designed may be his biggest challenge yet. It’s undoubtedly the most important one for next season.
