The Pittsburgh Steelers have been anemic on offense all season long. It doesn’t matter if it’s former offensive coordinator Matt Canada calling the plays or interim offensive coordinator Eddie Faulkner and quarterbacks coach Mike Sullivan working together to run the offense. It doesn’t matter if it’s Kenny Pickett or Mitchell Trubisky under center. The offense simply cannot put a lot of points on the board.
On Tuesday’s episode of the All Things Covered podcast, Steelers CB Patrick Peterson detailed the feeling in the locker room about how the offense’s inability to score points affects how the team approaches each game.
“As a team, in the state that we’re in, we cannot work behind the chains,” Peterson said. “We cannot work from behind. We have to keep the game as close as we can going into the fourth quarter to give ourselves a shot. Because the proof is in the pudding: we can’t put up 30, 40 points. It’s not gonna happen.”
The Steelers as a team have failed to score even 30 points through 14 games this season. Their best scoring output was back in Week Two, a 26-22 win over the Cleveland Browns. That game featured not one but two defensive scores for the Steelers.
The team has scored 20 or more points only five times this season. As Peterson said, the only real hope that the Steelers have, the only way “to give ourselves a shot,” is for the defense to hold opposing offenses under 20 points. The only game the Steelers have won this season in which they’ve allowed 20+ points was that Browns game.
Now, if the Steelers can keep their opponents under that threshold with a healthy Pickett under center, they do have a good shot of winning. In 2023 alone, Pickett has led the offense on three game-winning drives after doing it four times as a rookie in 2022. It’s been his one major calling card through his 25 appearances in the NFL.
However, the Steelers feel the pressure of needing to keep the game close per Peterson. They know what it takes to do that, and they’ve felt what happens when they don’t.
“That’s what it’s going to come down to,” Peterson said. “Us not kicking ourselves in our own butt, being a sound football team, penalty-free… When we’re on the defensive side of the ball, when we commit penalties that lead to scoring drives, on the offensive side of the ball when we commit penalties, it leads us to desperation third downs, not winnable third downs.”
There’s no question that the Steelers have been feeling the pressure of needing to keep games tight all season long, and it feels like the dam has broken under that pressure over the last three games. The Steelers still technically have a shot at the playoffs, but they no longer have any semblance of control that they did have prior to last Saturday’s loss to the Indianapolis Colts.
They have been trying to play all season long to give themselves a shot at winning games in the fourth quarter. Now, in the fourth quarter of the season, the Steelers need other teams to give them a shot at a non-losing record, much less the playoffs. According to Peterson, that means they need to play sound football, something they’ve struggled with recently.
You can watch the entire conversation between Peterson and former Steelers CB Bryant McFadden below.
