What is Pittsburgh Steelers QB Kenny Pickett doing better this season than he was a year ago? It’s hard to say, really. One might argue, not much, beyond volume. He’s attempting more passes, so he’s getting more yards. He did finally throw multiple touchdown passes in a single game. Yet his interception rate is higher than last year, and his completion rate is lower. So what’s the problem?
“He was having a little trouble identifying stuff and kind of getting to the right spot early in the process”, Hall of Fame QB Kurt Warner told Brooke Pryor of ESPN about Pickett. “He made up for it because he made so many great plays on the move and doing some of those things a year ago”. Now, not as much, though he has one game-winning drive so far.
Warner was high on Pickett coming into the regular season based on what he had seen from him during the offseason, including five touchdown drives on five possessions during the preseason. “I thought that was the thing that he did so well, is that he seemed to recognize coverage to see what teams were doing to get to the right side or to the right guy very early in the process. And it’s what had me so excited”, he acknowledged.
He credited Pickett with performing at a higher level with his pocket awareness, his playmaking ability, and his efforts quickly processing the defense, as well as the fact that he has been winning more often than not, even if it isn’t pretty. “You kind of think, OK, now we’re going to put it all together in the regular season. And from game one against the 49ers, he has struggled with that.”
And he has, there’s no doubt, although there has been some improvement. He is cleaning up his turnover-worthy throws while increasing the amount of big-time throw he’s made. According to Pro Football Focus, he had four of the former over the first two games and just one since. Conversely, he had just one big-time throw in the first four games, in Week Three, but had three in their final game before the bye. Yet that hasn’t been enough.
Warner said that playing quarterback is about “knowing where you need to start based on what the defense is doing to you”, claiming that Pickett has “struggled a little bit with that here early in the season, and that’s going to get you in trouble”. He said that Pickett, as a result, is playing catch-up as he takes time to read defenses and that’s getting him into trouble. But he reserves room for optimism, particularly from an organizational point of view.
“You go back to the preseason and go, ‘OK, I saw him do it. I saw him recognize it. I saw him get to the right guy’’’, Warner said. “There’s enough there to see where you still stay optimistic and excited because you’re winning games, you’re having success, you’re seeing those intangibles. You’ve got all this stuff to build off of”.
The analyst maintains that he sees enough there to maintain a certain level of optimism about what kind of starter he can be. It’s just a matter of figuring out what it will take to get him to do consistently what he does best. That can start with the continuing process of slowing the game down for him. The faster he can process what he sees, the more time he has to make the right decisions with the football.
