PITTSBURGH — You would think that significantly upgrading the offensive line in the offseason would make for an easy transition for the Pittsburgh Steelers into this year.
Plug, play — and play better across the board.
“Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t even work that way game-to-game,” running backs coach Eddie Faulkner said Wednesday.
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It sure hasn’t worked out that way for the Steelers through five games heading into this week’s bye, and it has ultimately had an unexpected trickle-down effect on the offense’s most important player — quarterback Kenny Pickett.
The unstable play of the offensive line has made Pickett revert to the poor pocket awareness he showed in his college days at Pitt.
It was one of the shortcomings noted by The Athletic’s draft expert, Dane Brugler, leading up to the 2022 draft, so much so that Steelers quarterbacks coach Mike Sullivan worked extensively with Pickett on it during the summer. Sullivan wanted to see Pickett move up in the pocket and slide to the right or left rather than just getting out of the way, whether the pressure he felt was real or not.
It worked in the preseason. Not so much during the regular season, which has many pointing back to the original evaluation of the No. 20 pick and the first quarterback taken in the ’22 draft.
Through five games, Pickett has been pressured on 29.4 percent of his dropbacks, the fourth-highest rate in the league, per Pro Football Reference’s charting. He has been hurried 20 times, hit 18 times and sacked 14 times. Some of them have been his fault. Others were the offensive line’s fault. All of them were the Steelers’ fault.
Pickett’s penchant for exiting the pocket even with ghost pressure — pressure that isn’t really there — isn’t new.
“He got destroyed behind a bad offensive line as an underclassman, and you could tell it was in the back of his mind on his (2021) tape by sometimes escaping clean pockets or feeling a rush that wasn’t there,” Brugler said. “His offensive line as a (fifth-year) senior was a huge upgrade, and he got better throughout the season. But pocket presence is such a ‘feel’ skill, and it was more work-in-progress for him than a seasoned area of his game as a prospect.”
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Pickett took advantage of a line that protected him for an average of 3.2 seconds per dropback in 2021 to finish third in Heisman Trophy voting.
“He’s got to work on his pocket escapability a little bit, like you always talk about escaping through the back door,” former Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger said recently on his ‘Footbahlin’ podcast. “He escapes to trouble sometimes. Runs to darkness. He has to see a little bit.”
Pickett is struggling with his consistency of when to stay in the pocket and when not to. There is a fine line between making the right choice and the wrong choice. Roethlisberger struggled with that for a large portion of his career before finally accepting what he was.
Roethlisberger would routinely say, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
But with Pickett, he hasn’t made enough plays as a scrambler to go by that mantra.
Through five games, his completion percentage is below 60 percent. He has just more than 1,000 yards passing with five touchdowns and four interceptions. He has one career two-touchdown game.
“He is very aware of things that can be better,” Sullivan said. “Maybe he gets a little greedy at times. It’s not a huge setback or negative.”
Roethlisberger was able to make big plays by holding on to the ball and buying time, but he also made mistakes by doing the same thing. Pickett did that twirling scramble to left against the Ravens last year that resulted in a touchdown.
This year, he ran into a sack against the Texans, injuring his knee.
“It is something I feel I have gotten better at and can continue to improve on it,” Pickett said. “I have the athleticism to escape and make plays on the run. So there’s a fine line between both, so let’s continue to work on it.”
Had Pickett stayed in the pocket on that fourth-and-1 play in Houston, he could have hit Connor Heyward across the middle for a first down or even more. Instead, he scrambled outside his protection and into the arms of the Texans’ Jonathan Greenard.
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“Kenny is a competitive guy,” Sullivan said. “He is going to fight until the end. he wants the ball in his hands in critical situations. We want to make sure he is doing the smart thing and getting the ball out of his hands.”
Many have blamed offensive coordinator Matt Canada’s scheme and play calling, and there’s some truth to that. But Pickett needs to take responsibility for hanging in the pocket and not be influenced by pressure that’s just not coming.
Or, in some cases, when it is coming, he has to stay in the pocket and deliver the pass.
“You look at the touchdown pass to George Pickens against Cleveland, and he hung in there facing the fan, and that’s a tough thing to coach,” Sullivan said. “Quarterbacks either have that or they don’t.”
PICKETT TO PICKENS. 71-YARD TD.
📺: #NFLPlus https://t.co/zWM8hlwdPY pic.twitter.com/jZJCBAqd81
— NFL (@NFL) September 19, 2023
Sullivan has been working with Pickett for some time on his pocket awareness. Pickett has also emphasized it with his personal quarterback coach, Tony Racioppi, particularly this offseason.
“I can’t say enough about how hard he works and he receptive he is to coaching and how much he wants to get better,” Sullivan said. “He will look at the video, and we will step back and say here is a situation where we can climb that pocket. Here is a situation where you have to escape. Here is a situation where you have to hang in there.”
It is not unusual for a young quarterback to have pocket awareness issues. You can pretty much label it as part of growing into a good quarterback, just as much as anything else.
The Steelers are acutely aware that it has always been an issue with Pickett and have worked on it on the field and in the classroom.
“Every quarterback making the transition from college to the pros, the linemen are bigger and faster and the complexity of the schemes and pressure packages being tied into the packages is a huge step up,” Sullivan said. “We are happy with the progress he’s making.”
Now, a little more help from the offensive line would expedite the process significantly.
(Top photo: Thomas Shea / USA Today)
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