I’ve already written a little bit about the Sunday performance of Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in his first game back from a sprained left MCL and while I’ll have his complete passing chart for you later on in the week, I thought you might like to see a few numbers ahead of that.
What’s pretty amazing is the amount of deep passes that Roethlisberger threw on Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals. In fact, he threw more than 16 yards in the air past the line of scrimmage 15 times in the game, according to my initial numbers. Roethlisberger only completed 3 of those 15 passes, however, and all three of his interceptions were on passes thrown more than 15 yards in the air past the line of scrimmage.
Please note that two of those incomplete passes were wiped out by defensive penalties and thus will not show in the official stats and won’t be charted. Additionally, 8 of those 15 deep passes traveled 20 or more yards in the air past the line of scrimmage and none of them were completed.
Roethlisberger, as you would expect, connected on most of his shorter throws in Sunday’s game. In fact, of his 28 pass attempts that flew 10 or less yards past the line of scrimmage he only failed to complete just 5 of those throws.
On Roethlisberger’s four throws between 11 and 15 yards past the line of scrimmage, he completed two of them.
