Steelers and Sam Darnold

And again, if Pickett had it, he would have showed more than he did, even under Tomlin, even under Canada.

 

Read it again. He still wasn't 100 percent. My injury narrative is accurate. If anything, they saw that they couldn't trust him to stay healthy with yet another problem after the injuries in Pittsburgh.

The last bit is you making an assumption that fits your chosen narrative, not anything that is in the article.

 

He showed flashes as a rookie, but if you take the aggression out of most young quarterbacks, the results are going to be terrible.

It wasn't just Tomlin and Canada. It was relying on Johnson at receiver. It was a terrible center who disrupted plays with bad snaps and got shoved into the backfield far too often, too.

Pickett wasn't a top-10 talent. He needed a good situation. He got a terrible one.

 

And then he ran like a coward when he was told he had to compete

 

Pickett looked better here than he did at any of his other stops. I don't know why people keep saying this team was bad for him. Like you say, he ran away when Wilson was brought in and we had to also bring in Fields. He had the famous flip sack play in Philly, he lost out to 2 rookies in Cleveland, and played behind a one legged Geno Smith in LV. Now, we don't know if he even gets another shot. He would have been backup to Paxton Lynch.

 

Matt Canada
Weak Oline
Named QB1 in week 4 of rookie season
Benched after injury
Brought in hall of fame QB as "competition", which it was very likely not going to be.

 

I completely agree that Pickett was a terrible QB, and it would have been the same even if he'd been in a better situation.

But the situation the Steelers put him in was embarrassing, like keeping Matt Canada for so long and starting him when the Steelers were facing a very tough four-game stretch on paper in 2022. It put him in an impossible situation right from the start. Many rookie QB would have failed in that situation, so the Steelers deserve some blame for it.

But Pickett was still just awful, 13 touchdown passes in 24 games, and the times the Steelers tried to open up the offense, like in the first four games of 2022 and the first four games of 2023, he was a turnover machine too.

 

As bad as things may have been in Pittsburgh if we take the worst outlooks offered here....they still get better on the field production from Pickett, Fields, Wilson, and Rodgers than anyone else has in the past 3 seasons or so.

That seems often enough to be a pattern rather than a coincidence.

 

Wilson and Fields with us was about the same to what they were in Denver or the bears in 2023.Same for Rodgers in 2024 vs 2025,except the W-L record and higher expectation in New York in 2024

 

Not once he ran from the competition

 

Or in PHI.

Or in CLE.

Or in LV.

Instead, he got outplayed (or at least played to a draw) by the 3rd string QB in all of these places. Just like he did in Pittsburgh.

 

He's good (maybe even very good) at deep shoulder passes down the sideline.

So in year 2, opposing defenses saw this and tried to take it away to see if Kenny had any other "clubs in his bag".

He did not.

 

He wasn't told he had to compete. He was told Wilson would be the starter, so he wouldn't get the chance to compete. You know this, yet you troll anyway.

 

I watched no Pitt football. But I watched everything I could find of KP before the draft that year. And all his "good" plays were some version of escaping out of the backside of the pocket, resetting outside the tackle box, and flinging it deep to Addison who beat his guy on a busted play.

Weird how a dude with average at best footspeed and average at best arm strength couldn't make his Josh Allen impersonation work in the NFL.

KP was billed as this advanced processor and hyper-accurate passer by many leading up and post-draft. That turned out to be comical at best. I do not care how broken, inept, and poorly designed Matt Canada's offense was. We repeatedly saw KP struggle to hit a WR on time, on his front side, on a 5 yard crossing route. How many crossing routes must KP have thrown before he was ever a Steeler? Thousands? And he couldn't even do that reliably.

 

The offense did not. They steered him away from the middle of the field unless absolutely necessary, as they have often done the last few seasons. That was particularly stupid with Pickett, who did most of his damage attacking the middle of the field at Pitt.

 

This simply is no true. The guy did a great deal of damage throwing on time over the middle at Pitt, but the Steelers didn't want him throwing over the middle unless absolutely necessary. Tomlin refused to trust him to do the things he did well at Pitt, and the result was an overly-conservative offense that didn't do nearly enough.

I suspect that what you did was watch highlights you found online rather than full games. Those plays you described are the ones that make highlights.

 

That is another of your false statements

That is not what he was told

He was told Wilson would get “the pole position” to start camp

Quit making up bull**** to defend your Pitt loser

 

No, that is what the public was told, not what Pickett was told.

I do love the irony of you telling anyone else not to make things up give how happy you are to fabricate the Pickett's motivation for requesting a trade. You are the one filling these threads with bad fiction, mostly for the sake of trolling other posters.

 

Maybe?

But it is demonstrable fact that KP couldn't hit even Allen Robinson's slow old self on short crossing routes over the middle. Often when their was no defender to interfere. Whatever accuracy KP had in college, almost totally evaporated at the pro level.

 

I do not know what games you watched.

Fields' stats may not have been much to talk about, but he looked better as a functional NFL QB in a Steelers uniform than he did anywhere else in the NFL at any point.
Again, Rodgers stats may have been okay in NYJ, but they were never in most games and he piled up a ton of garbage time stats. Almost everyone associated with the NFL has remarked on how much better Rodgers played as a Steeler.
Wilson was horrendous as a Giant.

My limited point is that it has become fashionable to be one of the cool super-knowledgeable Steelers fans by flatly stating that everything and anything was a "scheme" or "coaching" issue. And there were several. But, start looking at various numbers....and you start seeing that the problems are more than coaching. Primarily....lack of talent at key spots. The end.

Personally, I believe that Steelers fans almost universally hope that it is some "scheme" issue....because that allows for the hope that some new staff can come in and change this and tweak that and suddenly their favorite team is a serious playoff threat. Unfortunately, most of the totally unemotional breakdowns of the team indicate that they are several players away from that at critical positions. And often positions that rookies struggle to impact in. This team is a few seasons away from being a serious playoff threat, regardless of coaching and scheme.

 

I'll take that maybe as an admission that you did. Missing one particular pass tells us nothing.