Sundays in the fall and winter can be eye-opening for fans of teams that are not playing. Yesterday’s slate of games may have been particularly illuminating for those who follow the Pittsburgh Steelers. After all, they just watched two of their division rivals quarterbacked by either inexperienced or recently acquired backups put up 30-plus points.
It really serves to illustrate just how poor the production has been from the quarterback position for years now. Let’s start with the fact that you can count the number of 30-point games they’ve had over the past three seasons on one hand and still have most of your fingers free.
Sure, he may be a Super Bowl MVP, but Joe Flacco just came off the street a few weeks ago and he’s been putting up numbers. He has two starts for the Cleveland Browns under his belt and thrown for 565 yards and five touchdowns. His two games with 250-plus passing yards and two-plus touchdowns are two more than the Steelers have had in the past two years.
But let’s keep going. Remember Jake Browning, the guy you never heard of a few weeks ago who was going to ensure that the Cincinnati Bengals’ season would end with a top-10 pick? Well, he’s been playing pretty darn good football the past two weeks since making his first career start against the Steelers.
A week after throwing for 354 yards and a touchdown (plus a rushing touchdown) in an overtime win over the Jacksonville Jaguars, he led the Bengals to a 20-point rout of the Indianapolis Colts, throwing for another 275 yards and two touchdowns (plus another rushing touchdown).
And after cycling through alternatives, the New York Jets finally circled all the way back to Zach Wilson yesterday. He put up 30 points on the Houston Texans, throwing for 301 yards with two touchdowns on the way to a 117.9 quarterback rating.
The point is less about how great these quarterbacks may be and more about the fact that it shouldn’t be so exceedingly uncommon to have the occasional good game out of a quarterback. On the whole, the Steelers’ passing game has simply been embarrassing, rather than just mediocre, for the past two years.
At least with Ben Roethlisberger, even in his twilight, you knew that the possibility existed for big plays, big games. He had two 300-plus-yard games in his final season and seven with at least 250 yards. He had five multi-touchdown games, including three in which he threw for 250-plus yards.
Since he’s retired, the Steelers are lucky to even score two touchdowns by any means on offense in a single game. Kenny Pickett has three 250-plus-yard games, only one of which came this year. He has precisely one multi-touchdown game. Mitch Trubisky adds one more 250-plus-yard game to that total.
Wins are more important than statistics, but production is helpful toward achieving victory. We were celebrating a few weeks ago when the offense finally managed to move the ball fluidly in a game in which they only mustered 16 points. At some point you just need to acknowledge you need somebody capable of making plays, not just in the fourth quarter, but at any point in the game. Because sometimes you won’t have a shovel big enough to dig out of the hole you make for yourself by playing bad football for 45 minutes.
