The fact that Pittsburgh Steelers QB Kenny Pickett already has seven game-winning drives in 20 career starts is both commendable and concerning. It’s never a bad thing to be able to step up when you’re needed most and make the necessary plays.
But being so frequently in a position to lead game-winning drives means you’re having few easy victories. And the second-year quarterback wouldn’t mind a few of those. In 20 starts, he is 12-8 as the quarterback of record. 10 of those 12 victories have come in one-score games, generally with either the offense or the defense needed to close things out. And in only one of those wins did the Steelers give up more than 20 points.
“We all have faith in each other. We’ve got trust and we all care for one another. There’s no one in there that has any doubt when it comes down to those fourth quarters that we’re gonna be able to put a drive together and go down there and score”, Pickett explained after the game about why they have been able to excel as an offensive unit in late-game situations, via the team’s website.
“Right now we’re just searching for that consistency all game”, he added, however. “We’re one or two plays here and there where I felt like we would’ve had more points on the board, we wouldn’t have been sweating it out at the end. We’ve just got to continue to work at that”.
True enough “sweating it out at the end” is the bread and butter of Steelers football. After all, Pickett inherited the job from Ben Roethlisberger, who retired with the third-most game-winning drives in NFL history behind Tom Brady and Peyton Manning with 53.
Pickett still has a long way to go until he approaches that territory, but given that most of his career wins have required late-game heroics rather than a comfortable victory built upon early-game success, there is reason to be wary.
The Steelers actually did score an opening-drive touchdown on Thursday night against the Tennessee Titans, but they did not find the end zone again until 4:06 to go in the fourth quarter. It was at that moment that Pickett threw his fourth go-ahead score since 2022 with five minutes to go or less, which is the most in the league in that span.
Yet it has been half a season since the Steelers last won a game by nine or more points, when they beat the Cleveland Browns in the finale, 28-14. The only other time since Roethlisberger was still here is already nearly a year ago, a 20-10 win over the New Orleans Saints, a game in which Pittsburgh entered the fourth quarter tied at 10-10, though they never trailed.
The Steelers have lost five times by double-digit margins out of 11 total defeats since the start of the 2022 season, yet they can’t seem to win that way. If they want to have any kind of sustainable success, they’re going to have to figure out how, because good teams simply do not subsist on grit and scrappiness. Far too many things need to go right to win by one score with regularity.
