Depending on how you read the tea leaves, you can come to one of two conclusions about the Pittsburgh Steelers and the quarterback position for 2024. Either the Steelers bring in a veteran quarterback to compete with Kenny Pickett, who wins the starting job, or Pickett will be the starter in Week 1. There are people who believe that any sort of quarterback competition this offseason will be a sham and the Steelers will roll with Pickett no matter the performance during training camp.
Regardless of where you fall on the debate, there are more scenarios in which Pickett starts Week 1 of 2024 than he doesn’t. Does that mean the season is a waste? Well, that truly comes down to the job offensive coordinator Arthur Smith and new quarterbacks coach Tom Arth can do with Pickett. There are two areas where Pickett has been statistically successful that match Smith’s offensive philosophy: play action and deep passing. Let’s take a look at the stats and see what that could mean.
| Team | Play Action Usage | Deep Pass Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Pittsburgh Steelers 2023 (Kenny Pickett) | 16.3 | 8.6 |
| Pittsburgh Steelers 2022 (Kenny Pickett) | 17.1 | 12.1 |
| Pittsburgh Steelers 2021 (Ben Roethlisberger) | 18.5 | 10.9 |
| Atlanta Falcons 2023Â (Desmond Ridder) | 31.9 | 12.6 |
| Atlanta Falcons 2022 (Marcus Mariota) | 44.4 | 16 |
| Atlanta Falcons 2021 (Matt Ryan) | 28.0 | 9.1 |
| Tennessee Titans 2020 (Ryan Tannehill) | 36.2 | 8.3 |
| Tennessee Titans 2019 (Ryan Tannehill) | 30.9 | 13.9 |
Play Action
It’s no secret that the Steelers rarely utilized play action under former offensive coordinator Matt Canada. The why is a mystery. Regardless of how you view play action, a run-heavy team should be utilizing it to take advantage of defenses keying to the run. Yet the Steelers attempted play-action passes only 80 times in 2023, the fewest in the league. By contrast, the Atlanta Falcons under Smith attempted 156 play-action passes which was tied for seventh-most in the league.
In fact, if you look at Smith’s offenses during his three years as head coach of the Falcons and two seasons as the offensive coordinator of the Tennessee Titans, play-action is a huge staple of his offensive identity. Per Pro Football Focus, we can see that the Falcons consistently utilized play-action no matter the quarterback in the table above. The same goes for Ryan Tannehill in Tennessee under Smith.
When you compare those percentages to the Steelers’ offense under Canada (or utilizing his playbook after his mid-season dismissal), the difference is astounding. As you can see in the table above, Canada’s best usage rate of play action (Roethlisberger in 2021) still wasn’t close to Smith’s lowest usage rate (Ryan in 2021.)
For further context, Steeler Depot’s Clayton Eckert did a deep dive comparing the play-action statistics of the 2023 Steelers and Falcons, and it’s well worth checking out. The other notable statistic from Eckert’s study is the yards per play-action attempt. Not only did the Steelers rarely attempt play action but they weren’t aggressive attacking down the field. Were both things due mostly to Canada’s scheme or the players executing the play calls?
Well, what we do know is that Pickett has been quite steady when he’s been asked to execute play-action. Per Pro Football Focus, Pickett dropped back a total of 59 times on play-action play calls, which was only 16.3 percent of his total dropbacks in 2023. He was sacked twice and scrambled four more times which meant he only attempted 53 play-action passes. However, he completed 79.2 percent of those attempts at 7.3 yards per attempt and threw for two touchdowns. Per PFF, Pickett led the league in play-action completion percentage.
So if Pickett can keep his completion percentage in a good spot with a massively increased usage rate under Smith, that’s going to be a big positive moving forward.
However, not all play-action stats are rosy with Pickett. His 7.3 yards per attempt left him tied for 36th with the New York Giants’ Daniel Jones and the Denver Broncos’ Russell Wilson. That’s bad. Yet it leads us to another area in which Pickett has shown a degree of success that lines up with Smith’s historical tendencies.
Deep Passing
Wait, didn’t I just say that Pickett’s yards per attempt on play-action passes was incredibly low? So how is deep passing a strength of Pickett? Even when we take a look at his regular yards per attempt, it’s still quite low compared to other quarterbacks in the league.
Yet when we look at how successful Pickett is when he does throw deep, we can see that this may simply have been a function of what he was asked to do rather than what he is capable of. Per PFF, Pickett attempted 28 passes that covered at least 20 yards through the air which ranked 31st in the league among quarterbacks who attempted at least 10 deep passes. Only 8.6 percent of his passing attempts covered at least 20 yards through the air. Three of those passes were dropped for a 25 percent drop rate which leaves him tied for the highest rate in the league with Tyson Bagent of the Chicago Bears and Mac Jones of the New England Patriots.
Pickett did throw for two touchdowns on these deep throws. PFF also has a metric they call Big Time Throws, or BTT, which tracks balls thrown with what they call excellent location and timing. 11 of Pickett’s 28 deep-ball attempts tracked by PFF were graded as BTT, a percentage of 34.4. That percentage ranks sixth among qualifying quarterbacks in 2023.
Then when we look at PlayerProfiler.com, what they say about his accuracy on deep passes is very interesting. They have Pickett as the 11th-most accurate passer throwing deep in 2023. They also have Pickett with a deep ball catchable rate of 54.8 percent, good for fifth in the league.
So we can see that Pickett did not attempt a lot of deep passes, but he was accurate when he did. How does the usage of deep passes compare to Smith’s offenses? Ridder threw passes 20+ yards in the air on 12.1 percent of his attempts in 2023. In 2022, Mariota went deep on 16 percent of his passes, and in 2021, Matt Ryan attempted deep passes 9.1 percent of the time. The Titans only threw passes 20+ yards in the air on 8.3 percent of Tannehill’s attempts in 2020 but did so 13.9 percent of the time in 2019.
So only the 2020 Titans attempted deep passes at a lower rate than Pickett in 2023. So if Pickett can keep up his accuracy with higher usage rates, that should translate to a better offensive performance as well.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to understand why Steelers fans are unhappy with the state of the quarterback room. Despite some of the statistics laid out above and clutch performances, Pickett has failed to produce touchdowns at a rate only seen before by Chris Weinke. However, there are some underlying statistics that show there is still potential for that to turn around. Heck, the Falcons threw for seven of their touchdowns in 2023 off play-action. In 2022 and 2021, the Falcons threw nine passing touchdowns from play-action attempts.
Will play-action be the magic pill that turns Kenny Pickett’s career around? Will we see a similar jump as Ryan Tannehill had under Arthur Smith? That remains to be seen. However, it’s easy to see that Smith’s offenses have relied on play action and been extremely successful at producing touchdowns using it. Then you factor in an increased emphasis on attacking downfield and Pickett’s accuracy in doing so, and there is certainly potential for a boost in performance and scoring.
