The Quarterback Reveal

To refresh your memories, yesterday in this space I asked you to put yourself in the place of an NFL General manager and said that....

...you have your choice between two young quarterbacks at the relative same stage in their career development.

	Quarterback A	Quarterback B
Games Played	15	13
Games Started	9	8
Record as Starter	5-4	3-5
Attempts	326	218
Completions	201	83
%	61.7%	38.1%
Yards passing	2,089	1,410
TDs	15	6
Interceeptions	10	24
QBR	82.7	30.4

Okay, which one will you take?

Now it is time to identify these two young hotshot QBs, and I am sure that many of you, especially you Steelers fans out there, have no doubt guessed who they are.

Quarterback A is current Steelers back up Mason Rudolph.

Quarterback B is Hall of Famer and four time Super Bowl champion, two time Super Bowl MVP Terry Bradshaw, seen below at an age when he was putting up those horrible numbers back in 1970.

So why, you may ask, did I do this comparison.  Let me say right off the bat it is not to suggest that Rudolph is or ever will be better than Terry Bradshaw.  That would be ridiculous.  No, what prompted this was a remark by 93.7 The Fan's morning  hot take artist Colin Dunlap earlier in the week.  In one of the endless discussions about the future of Ben Roethlisberger, Dunlap stated "well we KNOW (emphasis mine) that Mason Rudolph sucks...."  Dunlap was basing this statement on how "terrible" (his word) Rudolph has been in the opportunities that he has had over the last two seasons with the Steelers.

Well, I thought to myself, I remember Bradshaw's early seasons with the Steelers, so I wonder what Dunlap, who was born in 1976, would have had to say about Terry Bradshaw in the formative years of his career?  I am glad that talk radio, as it exists today, was not around back in 1970 because surely the Colin Dunlaps at the time would have been boiling tar and plucking feathers to ride Bradshaw out of town on a rail.  In fact, there were people who felt that way.  People who thought that Bradshaw was a country bumpkin oaf who would never amount to anything and that Terry Hanratty from Butler High School and Notre Dame was the guy to whom the Steelers should go at quarterback.  I remember it vividly.  Colin Dunlap does not because he wan't born yet.

All that prompted me to dig into the records and come up with the comparison you see above.

It has always been my thought, for whatever that might be worth, that Mason Rudolph can be a good, maybe even a very good, NFL quarterback.  No, I am not suggesting that he will be Ben or Terry, very few quarterbacks will ever achieve what they have, but I am saying that it is too early to pronounce final judgement on him, and WAY too early to say that "we know he sucks."

One thing that I can pronounce judgement upon is that I will take the opinions of Art Rooney, Kevin Colbert, and Mike Tomlin and their counterparts across the NFL over the Hot Takes of sports radio talk jocks every day of the week.