Tim Benz: Let Aaron Rodgers write the Steelers' future. He can't erase the past

Aaron Rodgers was excellent in his debut as the starting quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday. He was 22 of 30 (73%) for 244 yards, four touchdowns, no interceptions and a passer rating of 136.7 en route to a 34-32 victory over the New York Jets.

That statement and those numbers really should stand alone as an appropriate summation of Rodgers’ sparkling play at MetLife Stadium.

But because this is Pittsburgh, and the Steelers’ regular-season opener is one of the most anticipated days on the calendar, hyperbole and exaggeration are unavoidable.

This year is no different.

I’ve heard/read the following statement dozens of times from fans, writers and talk show hosts since Rodgers’ initial outing in black and gold:

“That was the best quarterbacking performance Pittsburgh has seen since (fill-in-the-blank reference to a pre-elbow injury Ben Roethlisberger game/season/stat).”

Of course, that’s just not true.

Russell Wilson threw for 414 yards and three touchdowns on 29 of 38 passing (with one interception thanks to a horrible call that wasn’t his fault) in Cincinnati during a 44-38 win on Dec. 1 of last year.

In fact, in his first seven starts of 2024, Wilson — a future Hall of Fame QB just like Rodgers — went 6-1 with a 12:3 touchdown to interception ratio, averaged 255 yards per game, 8.4 yards per attempt with a 103.9 rating.

A lot of those numbers were just as good or better than Rodgers’ stats on Sunday. And, whether we choose to remember it this way or not, we gushed about Wilson the same way we are heaping praise on Rodgers.

Yet here we are pretending that we forgot about those two months of results, or acting like they never happened.

Why? Were those last five games from Wilson and the Steelers so cataclysmic that we are suffering from 2024 derangement syndrome?

Were the last five games so bad, so mentally scarring, that our minds are actively suppressing anything that happened before the Dec. 15 trip to Philadelphia as well?

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To say nothing of Mason Rudolph going 3-0 with a 120 passer rating, completing 74% of his passes at 238 yards per game with no interceptions and three touchdowns over the last three weeks of 2023 to salvage the team’s playoff chances.

None of this commentary is an attempt to minimize what Rodgers did Sunday. He was great. His showing was much better than what I thought he’d be capable of given his lack of preseason exposure in a new offense, and the pass rush heat he was facing all day.

I am simply trying to underscore how fleeting and fickle initial quarterback success can be, especially after just one game against a team that was 5-12 last year.

Especially when that quarterback is 41 years old, got no help from his running game, got hit seven times and was sacked four times.

That’s not a formula for sustainability.

I am also trying to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and selective memory that exists within the fan base and local media — both of whom seem to have an agenda to hit control-alt-delete on 2024 as if to pretend it never happened.

It did. So did the previous seven seasons without a playoff win.

Aaron Rodgers is good enough that — if he stays upright — he might be able to stop that trend.

But he can’t erase it. He’s a quarterback. Not an Etch A Sketch.

He can’t shake the NFL’s history books a few times and wipe them clean of the last eight years of the Steelers’ existence.

Or the last three years of his own.

Let him draw a new design for 2025, and we can judge the full picture in January.

That should be enough.

WATCH: Tim Benz and Mark Madden discuss the Steelers’ season-opening win in this week’s “Madden-Benz: Unfiltered!”