The Pittsburgh Steelers have a playmaking defense, even if they are required to live and die by it too often. In recent weeks, the running game has elected to show up and take over. It’s the passing game that still lags behind, Pittsburgh ranking 31st in the NFL with just seven touchdown passes—one of them by Mitch Trubisky.
They also rank 30th in passing yards at just 1,700 through 10 games, averaging an even 170 yards per game through the air. On the flip side, their 2,399 passing yards surrendered defensively barely even cracks the bottom 10 in the league, ranking 23rd overall.
So will the firing of offensive coordinator Matt Canada make any difference? With running backs coach Eddie Faulker running the offense and quarterbacks coach Mike Sullivan calling the plays during the game, can they finally ignite the spark in the passing game they’ve been struggling to find all year?
“I would hope so”, second-year WR George Pickens told reporters yesterday, via the team’s website. “All I can do personally is just keep working, but I would hope so, yeah”.
I don’t know about you, but that really seems to sum it up for me. All anyone can do is hope right now because that’s all there is to go on. While Canada’s game-planning and play-calling fell far short of desirability, it’s difficult to have watched this offense for 10 weeks and believe it’s going to get much better in the next seven.
The Steelers have been held to under 200 net passing yards in four consecutive games. The last time a Steelers starting quarterback was held to under 200 net passing yards in a four-game span within a season was during the 2008 season. They won the Super Bowl that year, but the offense was rather dire.
QB Ben Roethlisberger did not record his first 200-yard passing game until Week Five, going off for 309 yards and three touchdowns against the Jacksonville Jaguars. At the same time, he did not attempt more than 25 passes in any of those first five games.
At least in Pickett’s case, he’s thrown more than 25 passes in two of the past four games. In the case of the Jaguars game, he and Trubisky combined for 211 passing yards, but they lost a combined 20 yards on sacks, which negatively affects the net passing total. They were held to just 77 net passing yards in this past Sunday’s loss to the Cleveland Browns.
If they are held to under 200 net passing yards this Sunday, it will mark the first time that has happened in five consecutive games since the 2019 season—and that was the year Mason Rudolph and Devlin Hodges were starting 14 games.
They also had a five-game streak in 2015, but that was, again, while Roethlisberger was injured, first with Mike Vick under center and then Landry Jones. In a case in 2012, it was a combination of Byron Leftwich and Charlie Batch. This current streak? That’s pretty much all Pickett. Trubisky threw for more yards than he did in the loss to the Jaguars, so he wasn’t on pace to come very close to 200 in that game before he exited at halftime due to injury.
