After leading the Pittsburgh Steelers to a three-game winning streak to finish the 2023 regular season and qualify the team for the playoffs, QB Mason Rudolph was named the starter for the AFC Wild Card game against the Buffalo Bills by head coach Mike Tomlin. This was the natural choice with the offense showing its greatest results of the season with Rudolph at the helm, but it does raise questions about the future of the position in Pittsburgh.
The Steelers spent a first-round pick on QB Kenny Pickett in the 2022 NFL Draft less than two years ago. Tomlin has repeatedly referred to him as the franchise guy. Even through Pickett’s struggles, Tomlin has remained steadfast in his support of the young quarterback. He even referred to him recently as the team’s starting quarterback despite riding with Rudolph’s hot hand in what will now be three straight weeks of Pickett being healthy enough to play.
Former NFL QB Brady Quinn talked about this situation and questioned the decision to continue with Rudolph on the Two Pros and a Cup of Joe podcast on Fox Sports Radio.
“Don’t you wanna see him [Pickett] getting more games under Eddie Faulkner and Mike Sullivan calling plays? I mean he was improved,” Quinn said. “These are the moments that you want to see him compete and see what he’s capable of doing, but there’s also an element of like, well let’s see what we have in him.”
This was one of the big fears when Pickett initially got injured. If he couldn’t see the field again this season, how would the Steelers know what they have in their young first-round quarterback? He played his entire career under one of the least productive offensive coordinators in league history and got one-and-a-half games without him before getting injured.
Making matters more difficult, Pickett played the best game of his career in that first game without Canada and had an okay start in the next game. Without Canada, Pickett completed 31-of-43 attempts for 348 yards and had a combined passer rating in the 90s. Quinn said Rudolph is “not the long-term answer,” so naturally his preference would be to go with the younger player on whom the jury is still out. Because technically, yes, that would give the team the most useful information for future roster building.
“I understand you wanna win,” Quinn said. “You’ve had this momentum now, but there still has to be a longer-term vision of if this guy’s healthy, let’s put him in there. Let’s play him.”
It is important to note that Quinn is more or less coming from the viewpoint that the Steelers stand no chance in this playoff game against the Bills in which the Steelers are 10-point underdogs.
“If they’re gonna go down, why not go down with a guy that you invested a first round pick, see if he can help lead you to victory on the road. And if he can’t, then it gives you a little more clarity going in the offseason of what that position looks like,” Quinn said.
If you are working under the assumption that the Steelers have no chance either way, then yeah, I suppose it would make sense to put Pickett back in there to see how he performs in a road playoff game. But the optics of abandoning the hot hand would draw criticism, and potentially even anger players who have seemed to rally behind Rudolph as their leader for the end of this season. Tomlin’s message to his players, and one that they frequently echo in media sessions, is that the team takes things one game at a time. If the task at hand is winning the playoff game, then Rudolph currently gives the Steelers the best shot to do so.
