The Pittsburgh Steelers snapped their streak of 58-straight games without 400 or more yards on offense on Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals, their first game after moving on from Matt Canada as the offensive coordinator. The first play of the game, QB Kenny Pickett found TE Pat Freiermuth up the middle for a 24-yard gain. They carried that momentum forward and went back to the middle of the field throughout the game, and Freiermuth had a career-high 120 yards on nine receptions, also a career-best. The offense only put up 16 points despite its big day gaining yards, which leaves some questions.
The panel on ESPN’s Get Up discussed the Steelers’ offense on Monday Morning, and Dan Orlovsky was pumping the brakes on the level of excitement.
“No,” Orlovsky put it bluntly when asked if he saw anything different from the offense. “Other than Pat Freiermuth, and they did throw the ball down the middle of the field a little bit. And the connection with the tight ends, that certainly showed up. But the lack of details was still prominent, the predictability was still prominent.”
He then cited a few plays to make his point. The first one was this mesh route between George Pickens and Freiermuth in the first quarter.
One receiver is supposed to go over, and the other under to put pressure on the inside linebacker in coverage to make a decision. Instead, they nearly run into each other and awkwardly split high and low at the last second. Pickett’s first read is Connor Heyward in the flat, but as soon as he sees that covered, he goes back to his mesh point to see if one of them got open. Once he saw they didn’t, he tried to spin out of the pocket and got himself sacked. Yeah, Pickett probably could have stepped up rather than spinning out, but nothing was open and at best it would have ended up a throwaway. Either way, that put the Steelers behind the sticks on first down to set up a 2nd and 18.
Orlovsky then pointed to this third-down play in the middle of the second quarter where Diontae Johnson gets a little farther inside than Pickett was expecting, which resulted in the pass being nowhere near catchable for Johnson. The two of them have had communications issues in each game for the last few weeks now.
“Quarterback throws one route, wide receiver throws another route,” Orlovsky said. “That’s been the story of this season. How many times does this have to continue to be itself in Pittsburgh?”
Finally, he pointed to a poor read by Pickett, who doesn’t appear to see a wide-open Darnell Washington in the middle of the field on the play-action pass. Instead, Pickett goes to Warren in the flat for a loss of five yards. This moved the Steelers out of field goal range, forcing a punt.
Yeah, there are still some of the same issues that have been present all season. It was never going to be a flip-the-switch situation with the coordinator change, but it is disingenuous for Orlovsky to say that he didn’t see anything different. The tight ends had just 228 yards all season entering the Bengals game and finished the game with 141 yards. That alone is a huge difference, and while there is always room to utilize the middle of the field more, it was a definite step in the right direction.
Now that they broke the 400-yard mark, the key will be to sustain that type of success and start to produce points from all the yards gained. Up next, they have a very beatable Arizona Cardinals defense. Is the offense going to continue to trend in the right direction, or is Orlovsky correct in saying that the improvements weren’t as big as they looked?
