Will Howard is the first quarterback the Steelers have drafted since Kenny Pickett in 2022, but with far lower stakes. The odds of him working out better are hard to handicap, given that Pickett is on his third team already. But Pickett at least had an opportunity to start, even if he failed to catch on. Will Howard ever see that same opportunity, even if it’s down the road?
Whether he does see that chance, Brian Batko does see some comparisons between Will Howard and Kenny Pickett. It’s a topic that he addressed recently on the North Shore Drive podcast while discussing comparisons Howard has drawn.
“Let’s not get carried away here with some of the comparisons,” he said, noting mentions of quarterbacks like Ben Roethlisberger and Josh Allen. Howard is a bigger quarterback, bigger than Pickett, but doesn’t necessarily play much bigger. Likely, he will spend his rookie season as the Steelers’ No. 3 QB. Perhaps there he will be shielded from lofty comparisons that do him no favors.
“Let’s not do that to Will Howard”, Batko said, before offering his own comparison. “He’s a nice player. I think he did get better as the [2024] season went along. I’ll throw another player out at you. And fans might not want to hear this.…Will Howard kind of reminds me of Kenny Pickett without the first-round pressure and expectations”.
There are a lot of similarities between the careers of the two quarterbacks, though Pickett never transferred. Both played five seasons, and only really broke out in their final year. Pickett’s breakout led to him being a first-round pick, though, and Howard fell to the sixth. Both also came out of college in years pretty universally considered weak for quarterbacks.
“Both guys, the arm talent was not elite by any stretch”, Batko said of Kenny Pickett and Will Howard. “But they had that chip on their shoulder, underdog mentality, and an edge to them and an obsession with football that could be the reason they work out. It’s just that Will Howard is a sixth-round pick instead of a first-round pick”.
Pickett is obsessed with football enough to have consistently employed a private quarterback coach—which Will Howard also does, by the way. Howard also has that love for the game, as he recently displayed.
How much did the high stakes contribute to Kenny Pickett parting with the Steelers via trade after only two seasons, and still in Year 4 looking for a starting job? How will the low expectations for Howard, likely to be the third quarterback, play to his advantage?
Few late-round quarterbacks ever hit in terms of developing into full-time starters. Teams continue to draft the ones they feel have a chance, except the Steelers when they drafted Chris Oladokun, apparently. But that’s another subject, and one can only hope they believe in Howard more, and treat him accordingly.
