Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin declared that QB Russell Wilson had “pole position” early on over Justin Fields. Well, in a two-man race, pole position can mean a lot more—especially when you start a few laps ahead. That seems to be Tomlin’s conception of a quarterback competition, especially in light of Saturday’s preseason finale.
Tomlin only left Russell Wilson in for the first drive of the game, which ended in a touchdown, before replacing him with Justin Fields. If this were still a competition of any kind, Wilson would have continued to play. Instead, he turned the offense over to the guy they know far less about, and who is more volatile.
Now, most observers never truly believed there would be a genuinely “open” quarterback competition for the Steelers between Wilson and Fields, in which they would split snaps evenly and have an equally weighted opportunity to win the starting job.
And perhaps in Tomlin’s mind, this really was a competition, with Wilson as the man whose job it is to lose and Fields as the man whose job it is to win. Fields certainly did not “win” the job, however, nor did Wilson lose it, so the end result is not surprising. But Saturday’s game truly told the story when Tomlin pulled Wilson after one drive.
After all, Russell Wilson missed quite a bit of training camp, and he did not look good last week. If this were any kind of serious competition, Tomlin would have wanted to see more than one drive on which Wilson made one key throw. Because that’s basically all we’ve gotten. Maybe, just maybe, he would have needed to see that if he had seen more from Fields, but he didn’t.
Fields played nearly a full game’s worth of snaps over the first two weeks of the preseason. With him in the game, the Steelers produced a total of three points. While he looked exciting and dangerous in spurts, the offense wasn’t functioning as needed.
The Steelers, including some key players, actively hunted for Wilson in March when the Denver Broncos released him, to the point that it prompted Kenny Pickett to ask for a trade. And had Pickett never done so, Fields would not even be here. Again, all things considered, it’s no surprise that we wind up exactly where we expected all along.
In fact, Wilson’s calf injury to open training camp was quite fortuitous because it gave the Steelers a long look at Fields. While he started to win some people over—even beat writers who were convinced that the team viewed Wilson as the starter all the way—he ultimately couldn’t transfer that into stadiums.
Maybe at some level, at some point, Tomlin was open to Fields starting. Maybe there was some set of variables that could have produced that result, including Wilson struggling. If that were ever the case, though, all he needed to see was one decent in-stadium drive from Wilson. He got that on Saturday, and out came the moth balls. Get ready for Atlanta, Russ. Here We Go.
