The Pittsburgh Steelers have struggled to pass the ball in 2023. Many hoped that the passing offense would be an improved aspect of the team this season, to no avail. They rank just 29th in passing yards and have recorded just eight passing touchdowns ahead of only the New York Jets, who have seven.
With this disappointment comes some level of blame. Who or what should get the blame? Kenny Pickett is an obvious option, as is Matt Canada. Other options that have been thrown around are the wide receiver core, Mike Tomlin, and even the offensive line. The reality of the situation is that it’s impossible to accurately dish out this blame, and it’s likely distributed to all of the aforementioned parties.
All we really can do is watch the games and also look at statistics that may be supporting what we are seeing. One common complaint, especially early in the season, is that the Matt Canada playbook was not putting Kenny Pickett in a position to succeed. Let’s look at a few stats to see if we can support this hypothesis. These statistics are provided by @throwingthedamball on Twitter.
As you can see above, Kenny Pickett is only ahead of Tyson Bagent, Russell Wilson, and Daniel Jones when it comes to the percentage of plays where the coverage was perfect. And out of the three he is ahead of, only Wilson has played even close to a full season.
This means a few things. One, it’s likely that there aren’t enough creative play calls to get receivers open. Whether that is due to a lack of confidence in Pickett to make advanced reads or a poor job being done by the coaching staff, it has had negative effects. Also, receiver separation was a big concern for this team going into 2023, and a bad situation became worse when their best separator, Diontae Johnson, missed multiple games with an injury.
However, when looking at these stats as a whole, they paint Pickett in a pretty good light. His EPA (expected points added) per play under these conditions is right around the league average. It even ranks ahead of notable quarterbacks such as Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, Tua Tagovailoa, and C.J. Stroud.
Take someone like Tagovailoa, for example, who has had a great year. He benefits from having two premier wideouts in Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle, plus a coach in Mike McDaniel who can utilize his talents well. As a result of this, he’s seeing almost 10% less of his plays perfectly covered than Pickett.
While Pickett’s injury is going to prevent us from seeing if Pickett is the guy for the next few weeks at least, it’s at least more likely than not that he starts 2024 as the Pittsburgh quarterback based on his contract situation. And if we want to make it through the offseason with any sort of optimism, stats like these will be important to consider.
