LATROBE, Pa. (AP) — Mason Rudolph knows the drill. At this point, maybe a little too well.
The Pittsburgh Steelers begin training camp each summer and Rudolph sits down in a quarterback room that always seems to include a new face or two (or sometimes three) and gamely try to tune out the questions about his seemingly tenuous grasp on a roster spot.
“There's always competition,” Rudolph said Wednesday at the start of his ninth NFL season, eight of them
in Pittsburgh. “That's no different this year.”
Rudolph has outlasted a pair of first-round draft picks ( Mitch Trubisky and Kenny Pickett ) and journeymen like Josh Dobbs and Duck Hodges during a career in which he has been frequently reliable, if only rarely remarkable.
While Aaron Rodgers will begin his 21st — and he insists final — year in the NFL atop the Pittsburgh depth chart, who else will run out of the tunnel with him for the season opener against Atlanta in September is anyone's guess, Rudolph's included.
The Steelers took a flier on former Ohio State star Will Howard in the sixth round of the 2025 draft, then grabbed the talented if still unrefined Drew Allar out of Penn State in the third round in April.
The young duo provides coach Mike McCarthy with the kind of raw material he has long loved to mold. Perhaps one of the biggest mysteries of McCarthy's first training camp with the Steelers will be how he views the position behind Rodgers.
Will he rely on the more experienced Rudolph — whose dynamic play down the stretch in 2023 led Pittsburgh to an unlikely postseason berth — as a security blanket should something happen to Rodgers, or will he move on to two guys in their early 20s whose next passes of consequence in the NFL will be their first?
While it's not unthinkable that the Steelers could hold on to four healthy quarterbacks, it is unlikely. No one is more well-versed in the math than Rudolph.
Sure, Rudolph worked with the second team on Wednesday while Howard and Allar split time throwing to players whose stints in Pittsburgh probably will be brief. It hardly matters.
“You've got to, the cliche answer is, keep proving yourself every day, because there’s a new flock of guys coming in each and every year that are great players," Rodgers said. “So I don’t think you’re ever (safe) unless you’re (Rodgers); you're never done proving yourself.”
If anything, Rudolph has proven he's a survivor.
While things haven't quite panned out the way former Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert planned when he said the team had a first-round grade on Rudolph upon selecting him in the third round in 2018, Rudolph has deftly handled every twist and turn along the way.
The player who was kept at a distance by franchise icon Ben Roethlisberger early in his career, who once found himself in the middle of an ugly brawl in Cleveland, who was passed over in favor of Trubisky and Pickett following Roethlisberger's retirement, who wasn't re-signed even after his rousing playoff run, is still around. He'll take it, only too aware of how quickly things can change.
“I think that it's just a fluid deal, it changes every day, which is the same with every training camp,” he said. “There’s a handful of guys on offense that are set-in-stone starters that are highly paid, but just about everybody else is, it’s a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ in practice league and training camp.”
While Rodgers will be the first Pittsburgh quarterback to make consecutive Week 1 starts since Roethlisberger retired in early 2022, he is a temporary fix. A long-term solution at the game's most important position has been elusive for nearly a half-decade.
McCarthy was hired in part to fix that. A meticulous teacher, McCarthy has a reputation as a quarterback guru, and his relationship with Rodgers is one of the many reasons Rodgers will almost certainly don a gold jacket at the Hall of Fame five years after his playing days end.
The coach who runs his own quarterback school revels in each lesson and pores over hours of tape looking for ways to refine things. He has three willing pupils in Rudolph, Howard and Allar, all of whom are trying to absorb whatever they can, whenever they can, from McCarthy and Rodgers, whom Rudolph likened to an old married couple.
Absorbing the lessons is one thing. Putting them into practice on the field is another. Whoever does it the best over the next six weeks will be given the spot behind Rodgers when the games start to count.
Maybe it'll be Rudolph. Maybe it won't. He learned long ago it's unwise to assume anything.
“I think we have a really good room,” he said, then added for good measure in a way that sounded equal parts matter-of-fact and likely wishful thinking, “I’m really looking forward to spending the rest of the season with those guys, for sure.”
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