Tim Benz: Making Mason Rudolph the Steelers' starter has already helped Mike Tomlin

During Monday’s press conference, Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin summed up his feelings about the club’s three-game losing streak.

“One week, you’re drinking wine, then next week you’re squashing grapes. Obviously, we’ve squashed a lot of grapes of late. I’m interested in a little wine,” Tomlin said.

After the past three weeks, I think most Steelers fans have felt like drinking grain alcohol straight from the bottle alone in a dark room.

Tomlin is apparently now so desperate to raise a toast in victory that he is turning to Mason Rudolph at the quarterback position. That’s pretty telling, seeing as how Tomlin benched Rudolph for Devlin “Duck” Hodges in 2019, pushed him down the depth chart by signing Mitch Trubisky and drafting Kenny Pickett prior to the 2022 campaign, and let him test the free agent waters this past spring.

Yet, Tomlin made the announcement Monday that Rudolph is going to be the starting quarterback Saturday against the Cincinnati Bengals. That’s if Pickett isn’t healthy enough to play. Rushing back a less-than-100% Pickett to start would be the latest indignity for Rudolph to endure, especially since Pickett was largely underwhelming this season at full health.

“He’s a backup, but he’s also a veteran guy,” Tomlin said of Rudolph. “He’s been in our program a long time. He’s here for those reasons. We got a great deal of comfort with him… He is a competitor. He believes in himself. He’s a calculated risk-taker. I believe that mentality is helpful to us under these circumstances.”

The system familiarity, competitive toughness and veteran presence all sound good. But, to me, that’s either Tomlin not having enough solid, on-field reasons as to why he is turning to Rudolph aside from pure desperation. Or it’s an attempt to avoid saying anything disparaging about the now-re-benched Trubisky.

The one thing that did stand out to me, though, was the “calculated risk taker” part. Pickett appears to have been programmed by Tomlin, Matt Canada, Eddie Faulkner and Mike Sullivan into making avoiding turnovers his only priority. He seems so risk-averse that chances for big plays are rarely explored.

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Meanwhile, Trubisky’s biggest problem has always been in the middle. He tends to get risky when certain throws don’t call for that. Yet, he tends to check down when a bigger play is needed.

Or he just throws the ball out of bounds when either of those two other options would have been preferred, such as (as Tomlin has twice pointed out) a failed third-down completion in the Indianapolis game that resulted in a fourth-quarter punt when the coach just wanted a few more yards to get deeper into field-goal position.

In his Steelers career, Rudolph has thrown 387 passes at 6.1 yards per attempt to go along with 16 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. By comparison, Pickett has thrown 13 of each in 713 attempts (6.3 yards per attempt). And, in two years as a Steeler, Trubisky has thrown eight TDs and 10 picks in 287 attempts (6.56 yards per attempt).

So Rudolph’s stats aren’t overwhelmingly different than the two above him on the depth chart. And even if they were, would the Steelers mandate a similar no-turnover rule with Rudolph as they have had with the other two QBs over these past two seasons?

My guess is they would have, and they definitely still will now with Rudolph under center.

So I suppose that’s just another way of me saying, “Does it really matter?” Between these three options, is there really a good choice, especially with the Canada-designed, Tomlin-approved construct of an offense that Faulkner and Sullivan are running?

No. No, there isn’t.

Consider the opposing quarterback who’ll be starting Saturday for Cincinnati. Jake Browning looked like a journeyman jabroni in his first start replacing Joe Burrow on Nov. 26. He was 19 of 26 for 227 yards with a touchdown, an interception and four sacks allowed in a 16-10 loss to the Steelers.

Since then, Cincy has won all three games with him at the helm, throwing for 953 yards, five TDs, two picks, six sacks and a passer rating of 112.

Did Browning just learn how to play quarterback in one week? Or did he simply knock off a little rust and get the handle of an offense with multiple weapons and a system that’s won a division title and has gone to the conference championship each of the past two years?

So, even though I wouldn’t have known who Jake Browning was if he was standing next to me at Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, I’m going to assume that the Bengals have the advantage at QB, regardless of which Steeler starts (or which one finishes) the game.

However, switching the quarterbacks will pay off with one substantial benefit for Tomlin and the rest of the franchise this week. It gets all of us in the media focusing on just the QB position for a while instead of discussing how big of a mess the entire rest of the organization is.

Hey, guilty as charged.

You’re reading a column I just wrote about it, and I’m sure I’ll be talking about it a bunch on the radio, podcasts and TV over the next few days.

So mission accomplished, Coach T! Have a glass of wine on me. I’ll be in the basement with my bottle of Everclear.

Listen: Tim Benz and Joe Rutter discuss the Steelers losing streak, their quarterback change, and Saturday’s game against the Bengals