It feels like everyone is drinking the Pittsburgh Steelers Kool-Aid after another dominant preseason performance from the team, beating the Buffalo Bills 27-15 Saturday night.
The main culprit for the outcry of support is the lead man under center Kenny Pickett who once again looked cool, calm, and collected in his second crack at live football this season.
CBS Sports NFL writer Ryan Wilson is the latest believer in Pittsburgh as he broke down his biggest winners and losers from Week 2 of the Preseason. Wilson chose the Steelers offense as his biggest winner of the night, highlighting the play of the team’s young quarterback and comparing the current offense to a potent one in the past.
“I’ll start with Kenny Pickett. The second-year quarterback was a tidy 3-4 with a touchdown pass, last week he was an even tidier 6-7 with a touchdown pass.” Wilson said on CBS HQ. “It looks like business as usual. This is old-school Steelers with Big Ben and Antonio Brown, Heath Miller, all those playmakers they had. New cast of characters, but same result.”
While I’m not sure if it’s time to champion the current Steelers stars to future Hall-of-Famers, the excitement is certainly warranted. After two years of slow-moving, vanilla offenses, Pittsburgh finally seems primed to take a leap this season.
In just two preseason contests, the Steelers have broken two splash scoring plays of 30-yards or more in back-to-back weeks, something they sorely missed last season.
On top of that, Pickett has looked sharper than a three-piece suit. In three drives with the first-team offense, the 25-year-old is 9-for-11 for 113 yards, two touchdowns, and a 149.1 passer rating. Moreover, while it is an incredibly small sample size, his yards per attempt are up from 6.2 last season to 10.2 through two preseason games. According to PFF, Pickett also owns an 88.2 grade this preseason. To put that number into perspective, last season Joe Burrow and Patrick Mahomes were tied with the NFL’s best grade of 92.
Outside of pure numbers, Pickett looks more comfortable in the offense. Instead of panicking early to escape the pocket, he is far more measured, trusting his reads, stepping up, and throwing his offensive weapons open. And thus far, those new offensive weapons seem to be paying off for the second-year man.
Allen Robinson flashed as a chain mover in the team’s game against the Buffalo Bills, Calvin Austin Jr. gave life to a lackluster punt return game a season ago, and Isaac Seumalo sealed a key block on Jaylen Warren’s explosive 62-yard run. Couple this with the improvements of George Pickens, Dan Moore, and offensive coordinator Matt Canada, and the Steelers seemed to have solved most of their previous ailments on offense.
It’s early, but as Wilson said, you have to be impressed at this point.
