Ben Roethlisberger took a big shot at Mike Tomlin and the Pittsburgh Steelers

The Pittsburgh Steelers are living their worst moment of the season after three losses against the Arizona Cardinals, the New England Patriots and the Colts. After Ben Roethlisberger announced his retirement, they haven’t found their quarterback of the future.

Mitch Trubisky was supposed to be their transition player at the position, but, suddenly, Kenny Pickett emerged as a long term solution. However, due to bad performances and injuries, none of them have fulfiled the expectations.

Now, the Steelers have no margin of error if they want to reach the playoffs in the NFL and then make a Super Bowl run. With a 7-7 record, they’re on the brink of elimination. Their remaining rivals on the schedule are the Bengals, Seahawks and Ravens.

In a shocking turn of events, before the game with the Colts, Ben Roethlisberger had a subtle message of criticism for head coach Mike Tomlin. It’s a huge message even for Art Rooney II and the front office. By the way, the players didn’t respond on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium.

Ben Roethlisberger isn’t happy with Mike Tomlin’s job (Getty Images)

Ben Roethlisberger says Mike Tomlin has lost the Steeler Way

After their terrible performances against the Arizona Cardinals and the New England Patriots, the Steelers became the first team over .500 to lose consecutive games to teams 8+ games under .500.

As a consequence, Ben Roethlisberger took a shot at head coach Mike Tomlin by saying Pittsburgh’s tradition might be lost blaming the lack of attitude of many offensive players. It all happened during an appearance in his podcast Footbahlin.

“Maybe the tradition of the Pittsburgh Steelers is done. Who is grabbing someone by the face mask and saying: ‘That’s not what we do’. Is that happening? Yes, you have guys on defense doing it, but you need guys on other sides of the ball doing it. You need someone to stand up in that room, on offense, and be like, hey, this isn’t what it means to wear the black and gold.”

Big Ben takes a big shot at Mike Tomlin

Furthermore, Ben Roethlisberger criticized Mike Tomlin for many coaching decision which have impacted the Steelers during the 2023 season. The former quarterback mentioned another example was the end the game against the New England Patriots.

“You can’t afford in the second half of games to burn silly timeouts and to not have them late in the game. To me, that’s bad coaching. There’s some feel you have to have in those situations because timeouts can be so valuable as we saw in this game.”

According to Big Ben, the dangerous situation is that Steelers are losing their identity. “This isn’t what has been handed down from those teams of the ’70s. The Steel Curtain, the four Super Bowls, the Nolls, the Bradshaws, the Blounts. All those people, it’s unbelievable.”