Two Games In, Russell Wilson Is Changing Expectations For The Steelers

The most readily apparent symptom of the organizational malaise that has afflicted the Steelers since Ben Roethlisberger’s elbow ligaments snapped in Week 2 of the 2019 season shares a name with a Mad TV sketch: Lowered Expectations.

I would ask the same question of every team from 2019 on: Are they good enough to win a playoff game? The answer was always no.

The 2019 team at least had the plucky underdog thing going for them, and making the playoffs would have been a notable achievement, given the situation at quarterback, but they’d have gotten plastered had they reached the postseason.

In 2020, anyone evaluating the team in an honest, critical way knew they were cooked once Washington exposed them and ended their unbeaten 11-0 run to start the year. That the Cleveland Browns of all teams delivered the coup de grace in the playoffs – in spectacular, almost unimaginable fashion – was both stunning and an appropriate coda to a hollow, almost fraudulent season.

That should have been the end of the Ben Roethlisberger era, but he came back for one more go-round, and the result was much the same; a massively flawed team somehow limped its way into the postseason with a minus-55 point differential, then got smashed to pieces by Kansas City.

I would like to pretend that 2022 and 2023 didn’t happen, but they were more of the same, just with new faces at quarterback. The team was incredibly limited, still managed to stagger to winning records despite being outscored in both seasons, only to miss the playoffs in 2022, and be swiftly dispatched in 2023.

During this period of ineptitude, things got bad enough that I, and most other Steelers fans, started to view a playoff victory – just one of them – as a goal unto itself. Maybe *the* goal. It was unseemly behavior from a fan base that was supposed to have loftier aspirations.

Could you blame us, though? Look at the hand we were dealt; Roethlisberger at the end was a shadow of his former self, if that, and Mitch Trubisky and Kenny Pickett were laughable. No quarterback, no chance.

It wasn’t like the offseason upheaval that completely remade the quarterback room in the span of a week changed that dynamic, either. Russell Wilson was available for the veteran minimum because the Broncos were paying $38 million of his salary to make him go away. Justin Fields was damaged goods after a disastrous – at least in terms of wins and losses – three-year run with the Bears.

In other words, if you went into this year with the same worries, with the same, wait for it, Lowered Expectations, no one could have blamed you. During Fields’ first six games at the helm, there were still signs of the same problems that had been plaguing the team for the last five seasons. The offense was mostly conservative, the point totals modest, and though Fields’ prodigious talents as a runner were on display, and there were flashes in the passing game, the team’s 4-2 record seemed like it had been built on a shaky foundation.

As a matter of fact, I found myself still doing some of the same ridiculous things I did during the Pickett era; trying to find greater meaning in a 7-yard completion, praising a prudent decision to throw a ball away, prioritizing ball security over explosiveness, and so on. Fields was better than Pickett, to be sure, but overall, it was the same pathetic exercise in grasping at straws, trying to extrapolate meaning from the smallest of positive plays, clinging to any sign that a permanent corner had been turned.

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Wilson has changed all of that. And it has taken him precisely two games to do so. He’s thrown for 542 yards and 3 touchdowns in two games. His yards per attempt is 9.5, compared to 6.9 for Fields. His passer rating is 111.9. Those are just a few of the relevant numbers. The eye test is telling the real story. The behavior I described in the preceding paragraph really became apparent in retrospect. I had to see honest-to-god high-level quarterbacking to realize I had been deluding myself about what Fields was doing.

Wilson just looks much better. More in control, more confident in what he’s seeing. He’s making offense look easy for a franchise that has recently cornered the market on making it look impossible. By doing that, he’s allowing the rest of us to do something that feels new and novel: Talk about this team like they’re a real, actual contender in the AFC. Which they are.

I don’t feel nihilistic about this bunch. When I think about their inability to stop the Giants’ running game, I get annoyed because it feels like something that could actually come back to bite them in a meaningful way. Conversely, it’s something that, if fixed, will make them more formidable come playoff time.

Wilson stepping into a time machine and coming out of it like his 2019 or 2020 self means you don’t have to look at games against Cincinnati or Baltimore and pray for quarterback injury luck, or for the Ravens to drop something like nine passes, like they did when the Steelers beat them early in the 2023 season. You can actually imagine playing on even footing with the Chiefs and the Eagles. The Commanders look much scarier than they did when the schedule was released, but hardly like an insurmountable obstacle.

The league is still so quarterback-driven that if you don’t have one, most everything else falls by the wayside. My mindset was always, “So what if they do X, Y, and Z well? When it really matters, that stuff won’t matter.” There was always a cap on what could be done because the offense was so limited, so feeble.

Wilson’s deep-ball excellence coupled with his skill in the play-action game makes the Steelers dangerous and interesting. I defy you to find ten better throws in the last seven or eight Steelers seasons than the 43-yarder he hit to George Pickens with just under 10 minutes to play. It was an absolutely perfect downfield shot, one that both Giants defensive backs trying to check Pickens had no chance whatsoever to defend.

Now, the Steelers can take chunks of yardage. They don’t have to play defensively when they’re on offense. On the drive that ended with Calvin Austin’s 29-yard touchdown catch, Wilson converted a 3^rd-and-7, a 3^rd-and-11, and finally a 3^rd-and-8 on the touchdown play. This is how real offenses function. A negative play on first down isn’t a death sentence.

It has been five long years in the NFL wilderness, time spent as a team not treated as a legitimate threat. I don’t think the Steelers are the best or even second-best team in the AFC right now. They might be more like fourth or fifth. But I do know this: On any given Sunday, they can beat any of the teams ahead of them. They’re a serious player again.

Thanks to Russell Wilson, you can stop thinking about whether or not they’re capable of winning a playoff game, and start concerning yourself with what they need to do to win several.