It seems to me that Mike Tomlin chose his words wisely when he described Russell Wilson as having “pole position” in the quarterback battle against Justin Fields. It is a racing analogy that means they have the best starting position at the beginning of the race. But those in pole position don’t always come out on top.
One Pittsburgh Steelers insider isn’t buying the analogy, and thinks the race is as good as over before training camp has even begun.
“They don’t have enough time to get Russell Wilson ready and acclimated to this offense and have Justin Fields go through a training camp battle with him,” said The Athletic’s Mark Kaboly via 93.7 The Fan this afternoon. “It’s like the battle of two years ago. Mitch Trubisky, okay, he’s in a battle with Kenny Pickett and whoever. No, it never happened. I mean, they’re telling us right to our face. This is how they go about their quarterback competitions. Russell Wilson is the guy.”
With the vast amount of changes the Steelers’ offense has seen this offseason, I can’t really fault Kaboly’s line of thinking. It would be one thing if both quarterbacks were stepping into an offense with an established coordinator and veteran linemen and weapons, but that is not the case. The Steelers have one of the youngest offenses in the league, a new coordinator, new quarterbacks, and multiple young offensive linemen.
If they were to hold a true competition, that would eat into the snaps that the eventual starter would get. Chances are, that number of snaps wouldn’t be sufficient to hit the ground running in the regular season. Not just for the sake of the quarterbacks themselves, but also for those around them. The play caller needs to have a feel for the quarterback, and the whole offense needs to get a sense of their cadence, tendencies, and even the velocity and timing in which the passes come out.
Is there a situation where Fields performs way above expectations and Wilson struggles that could bring about a change in the pecking order? Kaboly strongly suggests there’s basically no path to that happening.
“He can just totally stink the next three weeks, and I still don’t think that makes a difference,” Kaboly said of Wilson. “He’s going to get that opportunity. And if he just plays mediocre, I think he gets the better part of the year. Unless something crazy happens, I don’t see any way that Justin Fields gets on the field barring injury.”
To clarify, Kaboly is specifically talking about Fields winning the job at the latter part of that quote. They go on to talk about specialized packages, and he does think those will come into play for Fields.
Fields said at the start of OTAs that he intends on competing for the starting job, that he didn’t come to Pittsburgh to sit on the bench all year.
The Steelers have an opportunity with Fields to see if he can be the quarterback of the future at just 25 years old. It would be an odd approach to create an environment where there are zero opportunities to evaluate him for the future. But the Steelers are definitely looking to end their playoff win drought, and that might mean rolling exclusively with Russell Wilson for their best chance at success.
The rubber will meet the road over the next few weeks of camp. We will have you covered here on the site with Alex Kozora’s daily training camp notes including all of the practice snap-count data for the quarterbacks to see how the competition takes shape.
