What comes next for the Pittsburgh Steelers is what comes next for quarterback Kenny Pickett. As tight end Pat Freiermuth said earlier this offseason, the offense goes as Pickett goes. To that end, he’s been looking the part throughout the past several months, and it’s been getting noticed regularly.
Ask tight end Connor Heyward, who was a part of the same draft class a year ago. He’s seeing the differences in Pickett, even though he said he’s the same person. “Maybe a little more vocal. That just comes with being more comfortable and going into year two and being the quarterback”, he told Mike Prisuta for WDVE.
“I think he does a good job of that, knowing when to say something, knowing when to just let it be”, he added. “He’s not afraid to speak his mind. If a guy’s not getting his depth or if somebody doesn’t run it correctly he’ll correct it, which is really good, and I think that’s gonna help us be on the same page and have that chemistry, game one through game 17”.
Interestingly, it really wasn’t until somewhat later in his career before former Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger felt more empowered to step up in practice and take command of things, to correct things. Of course, the difference is he came into a veteran-laden roster, while Pickett is more among his peers.
“It comes with the job”, the quarterback said earlier this offseason about his stepping up more in practice this year. “You have a feeling when you need to step up and say something and you do it. Everyone gets the message. It’s nothing disrespectful towards it and everyone’s moving to win”.
This Steelers team needs Pickett to step up. While they have some veterans, most of them have been imported from other teams over the last two offseasons, namely Allen Robinson II, James Daniels, Mason Cole, and Isaac Seumalo.
The only other veterans are Diontae Johnson and Chukwuma Okorafor, really, with the rest of the group being pretty young. Najee Harris, Pat Freiermuth, and Dan Moore Jr. all only came in a year before Pickett. Heyward and George Pickens were in the same class, as was Calvin Austin III. Broderick Jones and Darnell Washington are rookies.
Communication is the crucial element. It’s more important for everybody to know what each other is doing than it is for any individual to know what the right thing is to do. If you’re all running the wrong play, it’s better than half of the unit running a different play.
And that also goes for this stuff that you hear about in practice. Pickett’s communication is about getting everybody on the same page—on his page. The amount of talking he’s doing shows that he knows what he’s doing, and that he knows it well enough to be able to tell others how he wants it done.
