Steelers Now
Former Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Eric Ebron and running back Jaylen Samuels shared an interesting story about Ben Roethlisberger on their On My Soul podcast.
“Ben didn’t practice until Friday,” Ebron said with a smile on his face. “Ben didn’t practice all week. We’re running 7 on 7s with Mason Rudolph until Friday. Ben’s chilling. That was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.”
Samuels added, “He didn’t practice until Thursday, Friday. Every week.”
The Steelers started the 2020 season 11-0, but collapsed down the stretch, losing five of their last six games. That includes the embarrassing Wild Card loss to the Cleveland Browns at Heinz Field.
During an appearance on the Raw Room podcast last month, Ebron detailed that Roethlisberger’s knees were cooked late in his career.
That could be why Roethlisberger rarely practiced when he was teammates with Ebron and Samuels.
“We was snapping,” Ebron said of the 2020 season in which the Steelers started 11-0 before a late-season collapse. “We had a meeting. Ben called all the starters into the meeting. He was like, ‘Fellas, my knees is getting bad. I’m not gonna be able to get up under center.’ I go, ‘We’re one-dimensional.’ We’re about to run from shotgun and pass from shotgun. Makes it very obvious for the defense.
“We turn one dimensional, I’m like, ‘Cool, we kind of been shotgun the whole time. We should be straight, right? We forgot [the other team] gets paid, too. They figured out we went one-dimensional and Ben wasn’t getting under center. They started sending everything. Realized [Roethlisberger] couldn’t move. We was cooked.”
Former NFL running back LeSean McCoy also made an eye-opening statement about Roethlisberger recently when revealing the truth behind Antonio Brown’s Pittsburgh Steelers exit.
“And then your Hall of Fame-caliber quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, who they basically babied for years — even when he declined,” McCoy said on Speakeasy. ‘And AB, say what you want about him, he always was productive, he always was a hard worker. So all these things are going downhill for him, and now they ask him to leave? He was mad about that.”
McCoy isn’t the first person to make this claim. Many blame Roethlisberger for preventing the Steelers from drafting a quarterback when he was in the late stage of his career. Roethlisberger was famously unhappy with the selection of Mason Rudolph in the third round in 2018.
It’s 2026, and the Steelers are still in search of Roethlisberger’s replacement. The Steelers tried to replace Roethlisberger with Kenny Pickett, but that effort failed massively.
This article originally appeared on Steelers Now: Former Steelers Teammates Share Wild Ben Roethlisberger Story
