If you had to boil the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 woes down to two or three issues, quarterback play would undoubtedly be near the top of the list. Kenny Pickett failed to progress in his second year, and the Steelers had one of the worst offenses in the league as a result. Mason Rudolph provided a spark at the end of the season, but it wasn’t enough to suggest he could be the guy to get the Steelers back to their winning ways in the playoffs. They instead opted for a complete overhaul of the quarterback room.
Bleacher Report’s Brent Sobleski ranked several of the rebuilt units around the league that are primed to provide a large boost to their teams and the Steelers’ QB overhaul came in at No. 9.
“Make no mistake, the Steelers are dramatically better behind center, even with question marks swirling around both [Russell] Wilson and [Justin] Fields,” Sobleski wrote. “Pickett and Rudolph severely hampered Pittsburgh’s offense to the point where the unit finished bottom three in passing touchdowns (and four of those 13 came from Mitchell Trubisky). Comparatively, Wilson doubled the Steelers’ figure last season even though he’s still considered less than the version of himself that everyone remembers playing for the Seattle Seahawks.”
If all else remained the same for the Steelers in 2023 and they had Wilson’s 26 touchdown passes, they would have been the 12th-best scoring offense in the league rather than 28th. It is hard to get too excited as Wilson is coming off the worst two seasons of his career and an 11-19 overall record as the starter. But the worst seasons of his career easily trump Pickett’s best.
When Wilson was at his peak, getting double-digit wins every season and competing deep into the playoffs, he was surrounded by a good running game and an excellent defense. That figures to be the exact formula that the Steelers rely on this season. They finished the final 10 games of the 2023 season as the third-best rushing team and somehow managed to be the sixth-best scoring defense despite a rash of injuries.
The defense has a chance to be the best that it’s been in years, which helps take the pressure off Wilson to be the reason the team is winning games. They don’t need the “Let Russ Cook” era where he was throwing the ball 40 or 50 times per game. The offense isn’t really built to do that anyway. Wilson had the second-lowest adjusted net yards per passing attempt of his career in 2023 with 6.04. That is still a 15-percent increase over what Pickett was offering the team a year ago.
Wilson’s career average for ANY/A is 6.8. If he can be somewhere in between his 2023 efficiency and his career average, then the Steelers’ offense will function a lot better than it has in recent years.
