PITTSBURGH – Ben Roethlisberger wants to return to the Pittsburgh Steelers for the 2021 season, team chairman Art Rooney II said Thursday, but for that to happen, the team and his veteran quarterback will have to make some tough decisions.
With the salary ceiling falling due to a drop in earnings due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Roethlisberger’s $ 41.2 million ceiling for 2021 is unsustainable, Rooney said.
“Ben wants to come back,” he said in his wrap-up zoom call for the season. “We left that door open.
“I think we’ve been up front with Ben to let him know that we couldn’t get him back under the current contract. I think he understands we have some work to do there. We’ll have more talks internally, and we I’ll have more conversations with Ben, and we’ll need to know the maximum number to complete some of those decisions. ”
After losing the wildcard to the Cleveland Browns, Roethlisberger, 38, said he would talk to his family before making a concrete decision to return for 2021, but said he hoped the Steelers would want him back if he would. But will Rooney and the team give him the opportunity to write his own end to a storied career?
“With Ben, we owe it to him to have a conversation about how he wants to end his career, and we intend to.”
To cut the limit and give Roethlisberger at least one more season to finish on his own terms, the Steelers could ask the quarterback for a pay cut in the last year of his contract. The Steelers have already tapped $ 22.25 million off his contract, leaving just $ 19 million – $ 4 million in base salary and a $ 15 million roster bonus – to work with in a pay cut or restructuring. The most likely option is an extension and restructuring that will spread some of the ceiling in the 2022 season.
“I think those are discussions we will have with Ben and his representative,” Rooney said of options for massaging Roethlisberger’s contract. “It takes two to figure that out and whether we can agree on what he wants. We’ll just have to see it. ‘
As it stands, the Steelers have three quarterbacks on the roster for the 2021 season: Roethlisberger, Mason Rudolph and the newly signed Dwayne Haskins. But Rooney acknowledged that they need to add one more signal caller, potentially putting them in the sweepstakes for any of the available big name quarterbacks if they can configure the cap to be compliant.
“I think if you look at our room, we should add someone to the room this low season,” Rooney said. “We will look at all the options we have to do that.”
Determining Roethlisberger’s future is just the first step of many tough decisions and discussions for the Steelers off-season.
General manager Kevin Colbert’s annual contract expires after the draft, and while Rooney said the two have had a lot of discussions about Colbert’s future, nothing is official.
“I feel like Kevin is coming back, but who knows,” said Rooney.
Coach Mike Tomlin’s contract will run at least until the 2021 season with an option for the 2022 season, and in evaluating his head coach, Rooney said he believes Tomlin will lead the team in the future.
“We will discuss Mike’s contract with him as time goes by in this off season,” he said. “I’ll just say I’m comfortable saying he’ll be our coach in the future. … As for the work he did, we didn’t finish the way we’d like. The playoff game, it’s hard to analyze … just by flipping the ball like that you won’t win many matches I don’t see how you attribute that to coaching preparation I think the team is preparing for that match has taken effect. “
Rooney also said that if it were all up to him, he would enter the 2021 season with the same roster as the team in 2020.
“If I had my druthers, I would say if I could have the same roster next year, I would,” he said. “That is clearly not the case.”
With the team’s salary cap – the Steelers are estimated at nearly $ 30 million with 48 players signed, according to ESPN’s Roster Management System – it will be difficult to re-sign, if not nearly, free agents like Bud Dupree and JuJu Smith-Schuster. impossible.
“It’s fair to say this will be the toughest salary limit challenge we’ve had in a long time, maybe ever,” Rooney said.
But the first step in figuring out the rest of the roster is determining Roethlisberger’s future.
When Rooney bluntly asked if he wants Roethlisberger to return, Rooney paused and said he wanted him back, but he offered no guarantees about the quarterback’s future.
“I think we’d like to see Ben another year if that can work,” he said. “But as we said, there’s a lot of work to be done if that can happen; decisions may need to be made on both sides to make that happen.”