Man, the Steelers sure were tough to watch in recent years, weren’t they?

I was very vocal about this, wrote countless articles on the subject, and received a ton of negative feedback.

But that negative feedback didn’t make what I said any less true: The Pittsburgh Steelers were a hard football team to watch every season from 2019 to 2023. Pittsburgh was dreadful, boring and downright horrible..particularly on offense.

It’s just hard to witness a bad offense play football in a league that loves to cater to that side of the ball.

You might even say the Steelers were tough to enjoy through the first six games of the 2024 regular season. Sure, they were 4-2, but a record isn’t always an indicator of a team’s entertainment value and, more importantly, status as a contender. For example, Pittsburgh started out 11-0 in 2020 but spent about half of those wins looking pretty ugly on offense. Once the offense was exposed for what it was–bad–the team was unwatchable over the regular season’s final month and into the postseason.

The Steelers offense was ugly in 2021, 2022 and 2023. It just got worse with each passing season, and maybe that’s because the passing game was so horrible. Hell, even last year, during Pittsburgh’s 6-3 start, you could clearly see that the offense wasn’t nearly good enough for the team to continue its winning ways over 17 weeks.

The offense was a little sexier over the first six games of 2024 under Justin Fields than it ever was with Old Ben, Mitch Trubisky and Kenny Pickett leading the way, but it didn’t pass the eye test.

That all changed when Russell Wilson finally took over as the team’s starting quarterback in Week 7.

Wilson has passed for 1,626 yards in his six games as a starter. He’s thrown 10 touchdown passes to only three interceptions. His passer rating is 104.3. However, I believe Wilson’s most important statistic is yards per pass attempt: 8.7.

Damn, that’s a high number. Let’s ride!

I realize you don’t consider me a stats guy, but I know that yards per pass attempt has always been a great indicator of team success.  An offense with a high yards per attempt is generally a potent one. Of the past 12 Super Bowl winners, seven of them finished in the top 10 in yards per attempt and they all averaged seven yards or more over the course of the season.

The Steelers averaged at least seven yards per passing attempt every season from 2004 to 2018. What do all 15 of those years have in common? Ben Roethlisberger’s prime  as a franchise quarterback. The team went to three Super Bowls during those years and was among the league leaders in YPA in two of them.

From the moment Roethlisberger hurt his elbow in Week 2 of the 2019 campaign through last season, the Steelers passing attack was dreadful. Maybe that’s because the offense never reached seven yards per pass attempt. Pittsburgh averaged 6.3 in 2019, 6.4 in 2020, 6.0 in 2021 (Roethlisberger’s final season), 6.4 in 2022 and 6.7 in 2023. If you want to know the last time the Steelers dipped below seven prior to 2019, it was 2003: Also known as the year before Big Ben. Also known as the last time the team finished with a losing record.

Here’s an article I wrote in 2013 that talks about the history of yards per pass attempt and its relationship to championship contention/success.

As of that season, the top 30 quarterbacks all-time in terms of yards per attempt accounted for 36 league titles. That list now includes names like Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson, Jalen Hurts and Lamar Jackson. Two of those quarterbacks have won Super Bowls, while Hurts nearly did. Jackson has never been to the Big Game but has won the NFL MVP twice.

The bottom line is this: A high YPA means you have a professional quarterback on your hands. Wilson is that.

The Steelers have averaged 28.6 points per game with Wilson as the starting quarterback. Interestingly, Mason Rudolph averaged 9.7 yards per attempt when he started the last three games of the 2023 regular season and guided the Steelers to the playoffs. The offense averaged 27 points per game over the final three weeks. As for the first 14? Try 16 points per game. Maybe that’s because Pickett (6.4) and Trubisky (5.9) combined to average 6.15 yards per pass attempt.

The Steelers currently rank seventh as a team in yards per pass attempt at 7.9. 

The Lions are ranked first at 8.7. The Chiefs, the two-time defending Super Bowl champs, are 21st, but at least they’re right at seven yards per attempt.

The Steelers are fun to watch for the first time since 2018 because they have a talented and capable NFL quarterback leading the way once again.

Funny how that works.