The 2023 season feels like a new beginning for the Pittsburgh Steelers, the official start of the Kenny Pickett era following a transition year in 2022 in the wake of Ben Roethlisberger’s retirement. There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s figuring out his way of doing things.
That includes making more use of the middle of the field, as he told Kevin Adams and Jersey Jerry recently on an episode of the Steel Here podcast, published yesterday. This is an area in which the offense has lacked both volume and efficiency in recent years, but it seems to be a concerted effort going into this season.
“It’s just the concepts and getting guys up there. I think we showed it more in camp this year, and preseason”, Pickett told his hosts, emphasizing TE Pat Freiermuth’s role in their expanding more into that area of the field. “88’s gonna be a big driver of that, having Pat working the middle of the field”.
Freiermuth was drafted just a year earlier than Pickett, so got to work with Roethlisberger in the quarterback’s final season and with Pickett in his first. That was a substantial change, to be sure, but this season should serve to bridge that divide.
The rate of expansion of Freiermuth’s role in the offense likely suffered through the transition at quarterback, with some ebbing and flowing. One week he might see 12 targets and then the next only a third as many. Strengthening that on-field chemistry and making Freiermuth a go-to target will naturally incline toward more work over the middle of the field. As will the contributions of one veteran wide receiver brought in this offseason.
“Allen Robinson [II] was a huge addition that’s gonna work the middle of the field, a third-down, red-zone type guy that’s really reliable for us”, Pickett said. “Great leader. Huge leader in that receiver room. We have pieces now that [we] can get creative and do some different things over the middle”.
While the Steelers preach versatility even for their wide receivers, having a pair of strong slot options over the middle of the field in Freiermuth and Robinson will help to allow Diontae Johnson and George Pickens to focus their craft to the outside.
Not that they won’t all find their way over the middle. Pickett connected down the field with both Pickens and Freiermuth over the middle of the field for explosive-play touchdowns during the preseason. Those were his only two passes over the middle of 10-plus air yards, to be fair, but he only attempted 15 total passes, of which five were between the numbers.
Time will tell what a large sample size over the course of the regular season will look like, but this is not the first time starters on this offense have talked about an intention to further expand over the middle this season. “The middle of the field’s gonna be big for us”, Freiermuth said a couple weeks back.
