I’m not so sure that I’m ready to include myself in this list, but there’s a number of folks who are becoming more vocal about Charlie Batch being the best bet at quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers while Ben Roethlisberger serves his suspension to begin the year. Yesterday on Behind the Steel Curtain, a fan made the case for the veteran Batch. Now, today on ESPN Radio in Pittsburgh, ESPN analyst and former Steelers great Merrill Hoge made the case for Batch.
Here’s Hoge’s reasoning:
Charlie Batch gives you your best option to execute what you need to do. Do you have some deficiencies up front? You sure do. That’s why some people though, ‘well use Dixon’. Well, at the end of the day, I’ve never been in a meeting where we talked about ‘listen, let’s snap it to our quarterback and now you run around and just make something happen’. This game is about structure, discipline and fundamentals. That’s what every play is about. And once you break that, and you get outside those realms, usually bad things happen.
The media people go ‘well, he doesn’t stay healthy’. You need him for four games. I believe it’s going to be four games; you’re going to need him for four games. And I think Charlie is the guy who is best suited to do that, to calm you down. And I believe the players believe in him the most too. I think you have to have that temperature of your team. I really sense that Mike Tomlin has a good sense of that. So I would not be surprised if it was Charlie Batch. I believe watching what I’ve seen, if you need some stability, that’s where you would find it in Charlie Batch.