Steelers QB Mason Rudolph has spent his career trying to prove himself. And so it goes in 2026

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.