Mike Tomlin coached the Pittsburgh Steelers for 19 years, and Ben Roethlisberger was his quarterback for most of that stretch. So, any hit on him was a concern for the whole team. However, Tomlin has now opened up about how he reacted when Roethlisberger went down after a hard hit from a Baltimore Ravens great, admitting his first thought was that the injury was as serious as it looked.

“Ben is one of those guys, man, like, ‘Break glass in case of emergency,’” Tomlin said on Not Just Football. “… I haven’t been around anybody that not only smiles in the face of adversity, but kind of loves it. He got his nose broken in Baltimore one time. He comes to the sideline during a timeout, man, and his nose is on the side of his face. It’s like gauze hanging out of the bottom of his nose. His nose is on the side of his face. And nobody will really kind of look at him. And he looks at me, and he’s like, ‘Is it that bad?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, man, it’s that bad.’”

Back in 2010, Ravens defender Haloti Ngata hit him in the face and bent his nose awkwardly during a play that ended in a sack. However, Roethlisberger stayed on and played through, even threw the winning touchdown to Isaac Redman.

The damage was real, though. Roethlisberger had to get surgery, and was told that the bones “looked like corn flakes.” However, he didn’t make much out of the alarming condition.

“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s good,’” he said.

“Mario Lemieux told me I finally look like a hockey player,” joked Roethlisberger.

He went right back to practice after checking with the trainers that it wouldn’t make things worse.

“I asked the trainers, ‘Is there any chance of this getting worse if I practice?’ and they said no, so I said I am practicing,” said Roethlisberger. “I just want to win games and championships.”

There was a bigger worry in the background. His nose had already been broken and surgically rebuilt after his 2006 motorcycle accident, so the concern made sense. However, that was far from the nastiest injuries Roethlisberger suffered in his career.

In 2019, Roethlisberger tore three flexor tendons in his arm, needing season-ending surgery to repair it. Per CBS Sports, he believed it was the most excruciating pain he had ever felt, and for the first time in his career, was told by the team doctor to not go back in. He had an option to forego surgery, but that would mean ending his football career.

Then there was the hit by former Ravens linebacker Bart Scott, which Roethlisberger still considers the worst hit he’s ever taken. This was back in 2006, and furthered the rivalry between the two teams even more. An untouched Bart Scott broke past the Steelers’ offense and flattened Roethlisberger to the ground, who was there for some time after the hit.

“I remember laying there thinking ‘I don’t know if I’m alive or not,’” Big Ben said on his podcast. “It was the most painful thing. And I’m just laying there like, ‘Okay like yeah am I breathing’, like I thought that my soul was leaving the body and so that’s what it reminded me of.”

Scott admitted that the rivalry between the two teams had him fired up in that game.

I couldn’t wait to knock that smile off his smug face,” Scott recalled in a later video. “All I could see was that chest, that number, better yet, that chin, got a chin like Jay Leno … No one has taken more from the Ravens than Ben Roethlisberger. It was our time to get some get-back.”

But the ever-durable quarterback never missed any significant time that season. The only season in which that’s happened is the 2019 one, in which he’d torn the elbow flexors. He returned the next season and played 15 and 16 games, respectively, in 2020 and 2021, a testament to why he was able to last 18 years in the league.