Stunning Admission From Steelers' Mason Rudolph About Matt Canada Is Absolutely Baffling

The Pittsburgh Steelers should have been more competitive in the final years of Ben Roethlisberger's career. Instead, the last postseason win for him professionally came during the 2016 season; he retired after the 2021 campaign. It's unfortunate how it all ended up for the future Hall of Fame quarterback, specifically because he was playing some of the best football of his life until a 2019 elbow injury sidelined him for nearly the entire year. Mason Rudolph and Devlin Hodges would find a way to get the team in playoff contention, but it simply wasn't the same.

Roethlisberger returned to play in the 2020 and 2021 seasons. Despite having an incredibly strong start in 2020, the team faltered in the latter stages of the year and got bounced from the postseason in the first round following a loss to the Cleveland Browns. One of the oddest things throughout that year was the ineffectiveness on offense, specifically when it came to consistency.

Then-head coach Mike Tomlin promoted Matt Canada to run the offense in 2021 after parting ways with Randy Fichtner. Despite an 11-0 start to that 2020 campaign, the decision-makers made the move to give Canada a shot at working with Roethlisberger. Things went downhill from there, and fans were seemingly trapped in a horrible offensive cycle until Canada was fired midseason back in 2023.

Rudolph had a front row seat to all of this happening. He recently joined The Justin Time Podcast to talk about his Steelers career and a lot more. When asked about Roethlisberger, the backup quarterback mentioned that he respected the signal-caller's ability to make up plays on the fly. He even threw a major dig at both Fichtner and Canada, suggesting neither had any clue on how to lead their offenses to the end zone.

"[Roethlisberger] was one of, I think, hardest guys to bring down," Rudolph said. "He had an innate ability to call his own plays. I mean, I think the last couple of years [he played] in '20 and '21, there were times where we really — we weren't scoring, we weren't having touchdown drives if he wasn't calling the plays himself. I think he was a gamer and he liked to draw things up in the sand. 'Hey, you got this, you got that.' A lot of times muddle huddle, no huddle. That was an unbelievable ability."

Tomlin has faced plenty of criticism for a long while about his inability to hire effective assistant coaches. No one could ever understand why he basically had no coaching tree, something that still exists in the present day. The fact that the Steelers, in Roethlisberger's final years, could only score if the play-calling was done on the fly by the quarterback is relatively sad and a poor reflection on Tomlin's decision-making.

When stories like this come out — while coaches like Canada and Fichtner weren't mentioned — it speaks volumes to the fan base's feelings that Tomlin was not capable of hiring reliable coordinators. Veteran signal-callers are often trusted to change plays at the line of scrimmage, but Rudolph's comments tell a lot more than that being the only case. Roethlisberger didn't trust the play-calling, and had to go backyard football on defenses in order to put points up on the board.

Steelers Often Found Ways To Make Games Close In The End

During Roethlisberger's final couple of seasons, Pittsburgh seemed to always find a way to get back into contests late in the second half. A lot of this was likely because of the quarterback taking the no huddle approach. If Roethlisberger had the opportunity to ignore whatever was being said in his helmet, he was going to do it so he could be the one calling the shots. This is yet another reason why Canada still, to this day, is a sore subject for the great people of Pittsburgh.

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