On Monday, the Steelers issued a depth chart that showed Mitch Trubisky as the starting quarterback. That wasn’t much of a surprise. The next name at quarterback was.
The chart showed Mason Rudolph as No. 2, ahead of rookie Kenny Pickett.
After a full day of chatter and scrutiny and speculation and what not, the Steelers issued a new depth chart that flipped Rudolph and Pickett. Meeting with reporters on Tuesday, coach Mike Tomlin called it a “clerical error.”
That’s fine. Clerical errors happen. But why didn’t they fix it sooner? When someone points out that we have a typo or inaccurate information or whatever, we fix it as quickly as we can. Why did the Steelers wait?
Did they not catch wind of the reaction? Surely, they did. And it would have been a simple and easy fix.
Here’s a theory. Maybe they wanted to take one last run at finagling a deal for Rudolph. And if someone was thinking about pulling the trigger on a trade, maybe seeing him at No. 2 would have prompted that team to pick up the phone and get the deal done.
Now that the ship has likely sailed for anyone who would possibly be looking to add Rudolph before Week One, the Steelers were able to describe the whole thing a mistake and drop Rudolph back to No. 3.