Prior to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ win over the Cincinnati Bengals, they were scoring 22.9 points per game. Over the previous two outings, the Baltimore Ravens and Cleveland Browns held them to under 20 points. Then the Bengals came along and they put up 44 points, their highest total in six years. And suddenly they are averaging 24.7 points on the season, the 10th-highest in the NFL.
Is that just what happens when you play the NFL’s 31st-ranked scoring defense? The analysts at The Athletic Football Show could not help but wonder just that. At the moment, the Steelers’ win over the Bengals stands as an outlier, especially for Russell Wilson.
“This past week against an unserious Cincinnati defense at this point in the season, that’s gonna inflate a lot of the numbers that we’re gonna see from this [Steelers] passing game”, Fran Duffy said. “The way that Russell Wilson attacked the middle of the field, we have not seen from him in recent memory. When you look at the previous two or three weeks before that, we’ve seen this pass game has really struggled”.
And, well, that’s true, to a large degree. The Steelers against the Ravens and Browns did not look like the Steelers who beat the Bengals. There is some validity to this if you review, for example, Russell Wilson’s passing charts. Although he had a season high in passing targets, there was clearly an uptick in throws over the middle. And the success over the middle was pretty astonishing, Wilson taking advantage of a secondary with trust issues.
Robert Mays also noted some analytics that call into question the sustainability of the Steelers’ success in the passing game. He cited, for example, Russell Wilson’s 20th-ranked drop-back success rate when not using play action. Coupled with the fact that Wilson gains a full third of his EPA on plays when the Steelers use max protect, that is hard to reconcile the two.
“You’re in a bunch of pure passing situations. Is this passing game with Russell Wilson and with really not a ton of other pass-catching options outside of George Pickens, is that going to be enough to keep pace with the really good teams in the AFC?”, Mays asked.
He stressed that the Steelers can’t use as much play-action as they want to for a team forced into so many pure passing situations. They have to improve their first-down success rate as part of the solution. While they managed to do so against the Bengals, they have struggled against better defenses.
“Do they have that level of precision to the way that they can operate on offense? I still have some pretty real doubts about whether they do”, Mays concluded about the Steelers’ passing game. And quite frankly, that’s fair, because it makes no sense to draw broad conclusions from beating one of the worst defenses in the NFL. Now if they can have anything near that success against the Eagles, then we’ll be talking. But Philadelphia hasn’t even given up 300 passing yards in a game this season.
