Anyone who saw that brutal shot of Steeler’s QB Ben Roethlisberger smashing his throwing hand against his teammate’s helmet during the follow-through of his passing motion would be forgiven for thinking that that was one serious-ass injury (medical term there). With a lot of quarterbacks, it probably would be. That’s exactly the sort of contact that often leads to sprained, bruised, or even fractured hands or fingers. Pretty common to see QBs miss a game or two recovering from that sort of thing. That’s the same way that Brandon Weeden sprained his thumb in 2013, resulting in a two game rehab. Without knowing a single thing about this new injury, I can almost guarantee you that Roethlisberger will miss exactly zero games with it.
How can I be so confident about this? Well basically Roethlisberger is an unstoppable beast of a man. Holy crap, it’s hard not to turn that into a shot at him for his sexual assault history, but I don’t have the grace to stick that landing without falling flat on my face. Let’s move on and focus on Roethlisberger’s injury history. Ben has taken his fare share of abuse (again, hard to leave that one untouched) on the field. Since 2010, Roethlisberger has had a fractured foot, a fractured nose, a sprained foot, a fractured thumb, a high ankle sprain, a severe rib dislocation, and a dislocated finger. Quite the list there, eh? In that span of injuries, can you guess how many games Roethlisberger missed? Four. And two bye weeks. Three of those four missed games came from that dislocated first rib, an injury that is incredibly rare and severe. It’s one of those ones that people only get in awful car crashes, and yet it still only sidelined him for three weeks. Even more importantly, as you saw in that list, Roethlisberger is no stranger to hand and finger injuries. Remember I told you he’s had both a fractured thumb and a dislocated finger? Yeah, he never missed a game with those. They both came right before bye weeks, but technically he never missed time with them. I hate the dude, but that’s just incredible. Anyway, ignore any, “will he or won’t he,” start talk for Week 5.
