The meteoric rise and fall of Quarterback Kenny Pickett in Pittsburgh in less than two short years (actually, in Pickett’s case, less than a year and a half of games) is taking the NFL by storm. Personally, it’s the most stunning thing I’ve witnessed in 50 years as a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers — an organization known for stability, not chaos. And yet, it’s an organization currently wheeling and dealing players with an alacrity heretofore unseen in the storied history of the franchise. Fans accustomed to knowing all the starters will need a players’ guide next year.
The Kenny Pickett era began with great drama and rejoicing. (I wrote about it here at the time.) On draft night, April 28, 2022, it was the legendary Franco Harris, on the 50th anniversary year of his “Immaculate Reception,” who excitedly announced the Pickett pick. For Steelers Nation, where football is like religion, it seemed like a sacred laying on of hands, with the Hall of Fame running back providing his annunciation of the local University of Pittsburgh star as the Steelers new franchise quarterback. Franco was ecstatic as he revealed the choice of Pickett, and Steelers fans went wild, as captured on ESPN and various video posts that went viral on social media. Many fans literally wept tears of joy.
He deserved far better than what happened to him in this iconic football town.
Pickett was greeted with hosannas. In his first preseason game, an unusually large preseason crowd turned out simply to see him. When he took to the field, the crowd went bananas, jumping, clapping, cheering, chanting his name. Pittsburgh was now “Pickettsburg,” with t-shirts sporting names like that or “Kenny-wood” (Kennywood is the city’s historic amusement park). The shirts sold like Primanti Bros. sandwiches in places like the city’s popular Strip District. It was Kenny-mania. (READ MORE:NFL: Greedy, Woke, and Stupid)
Pickett got the start several games into his rookie season. The season finished strong, with the rookie clearly starting to flourish, and the team just missing the playoffs with a late-season surge. National analysts at NFL Network and elsewhere marveled at how Coach Mike Tomlin had already found himself a franchise QB to replace recently retired future Hall of Famer Ben Roethlisberger. Yes, just like that. Wow. Damn, the Steelers were lucky! Wait ’til next year.
The 2023 season began with tremendous enthusiasm. Pickett exploded with one of the statistically best preseasons in the history of NFL football, an effectively perfect passer rating, generating sky-high predictions of the Steelers winning 12, 13, 14 games, going to the playoffs and maybe even the Super Bowl. The regular season, however, started very rough, with a bone-crushing visit by the ultimately Super Bowl-bound San Francisco 49ers, whose physicality shocked the whole Steelers team. Still, Pickett and the team recovered and posted a solid record (7-4) that had them headed to the playoffs, even as his passing numbers lagged.
There was debate over who was most responsible for the team’s poor offense, though pretty much everyone blamed Offensive Coordinator Matt Canada, and rightly so. Long before Pickett, even under Big Ben, the Steelers stalled under the Canada offense. None of the team’s QBs did well under Canada’s offense. Touchdowns were not frequent. Clearly, Canada needed to go. The caterwauling got so loud that “Fire Canada!” chants filled the arena even at Pittsburgh Penguins hockey games.
Well, fans got their wish. Once Canada was fired, it looked like the blame on him was absolutely accurate, as Kenny Pickett in his very next start had far and away his best game of the season against the Cincinnati Bengals. He looked terrific, and everyone was thrilled, relieved. The game after that he appeared to be picking up where he left off, with a solid first quarter. This was another good sign. Previously, Pickett tended to start cold but had an uncanny ability to finish on fire in the fourth quarter, rallying the team to last-minute victories, leading the league in fourth-quarter comebacks. The situation now looked very promising. But then, in that first quarter, he got hurt, with effectively a season-ending high-ankle sprain requiring surgery.
Still, for the Steelers faithful, this seemed sufficient evidence that the problem had been Matt Canada all along, not Kenny. And besides, as most people with common sense know, and as was repeatedly stated by ex-Steelers QB and current analyst Charlie Batch, “a young quarterback needs time to develop.”
Yes, of course. And that has always been particularly true of Kenny Pickett. When he was at Pitt, he wasn’t very good his first four years. In fact, his stats were remarkably similar to his performance with the Steelers: namely, few touchdowns per passing attempts. But then, in his fifth year, it clicked for Pickett. He exploded, tossing 42 touchdowns versus only seven interceptions. In his final year, he posted Heisman-like numbers and obliterated all of Hall of Famer Dan Marino’s records at Pitt. He won the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award. He gave the Pitt Panthers their best season in 40 years.
To repeat: a young quarterback needs time to develop. At Pitt, Kenny Pickett was given that time.
Of course, Steelers fans and sports media should know better than anyone that a good QB needs time to develop. Their most successful quarterback ever, Terry Bradshaw, a number one pick in the 1970 draft, stunk consistently and did not thrive until the late ‘70s. He ended up winning four Super Bowls. Pickett’s 62.6 percent career completion percentage far outshined Bradshaw’s 51.9 percent. Bradshaw himself just three weeks ago urged Steelers fans to stick with Pickett and have patience. (READ MORE: Eldridge Cleaver: Black Conservative)
Indeed, in the past, Steelers fans and the organization had patience and loyalty. They gave players time to develop. A year before drafting Bradshaw, they drafted Notre Dame star QB Terry Hanratty, who they waited six years on.
Lest anyone think that such patient loyalty was a virtue of the distant past, the Steelers organization in recent years waited and waited on number one draft picks like Devin Bush and like, well, pretty much every no. 1 pick. Only 1996 no. 1 pick Jamain Stephens was dropped quicker than Pickett. As for those commentators who are now asserting that Pickett had a sudden attitude problem, well, that begs dubious comparisons to what the Steelers tolerated from their vaunted “Killer B’s”: Antonio Brown, Le’Veon Bell, and Big Ben with his horrible off-field activities that could have landed him in jail and did land him in the emergency room. The current Steelers put up with childish, petulant antics from wide receivers Chase Claypool, JuJu Smith-Schuster, George Pickens, Diontae Johnson.
And yet, for Pickett, the leash turned out to be incredibly, unusually short. And for what unforgivable offense? According to Steelers beat reporter Gerry Dulac, team officials judged that Pickett had displayed a bad attitude since his injury in December. He was angry that he didn’t get to start over Mason Rudolph at the end of the year once he healed from his injury (Rudolph was playing splendidly, far too well to be benched). He was especially upset when the Steelers last week signed veteran QB Russell Wilson from the Denver Broncos on a one-year contract, to compete with Pickett for a job that Pickett believed was rightly his.
Pickett’s crime was simple: The guy is a winner, a fierce competitor. He was angry about not automatically getting back the no. 1 spot. That’s a good angry for a young guy.
But if Pickett had acquired a bad attitude, it wasn’t strictly because of those moves by the Steelers brass. The overwhelming negativity among fans and sports media must have shocked him and sent him reeling.
Of those 24 games, Pickett won 14, and it’s not right to say he lost 10 because the losses included games where he came in late or left early.
If Pickett read the sports pages, checked X/Twitter, or listened to sports talk-radio, he would have been dumbfounded at how quickly everyone in Pittsburgh almost inexplicably turned on him. Even the most sophisticated critics at best could brandish a few handy stats, such as Pickett’s low touchdown-per-pass-attempt ratio, using that to definitively declare him a bust, an irreparable failure. Such critics rarely counter-balanced these coveted factoids with positive things that Pickett did, such as fourth-quarter rallies or (conversely) a commendably low interception ratio.
The loudest of these voices emanated from Pittsburgh’s sports station, 93.7 FM, The Fan, which broadcast a painful litany of 24-7 nit-picking denunciations of Pickett. Even Pickett’s biggest defender at The Fan, Andrew Fillipponi, was besieged, constantly, daily, incessantly tugged toward the dark side by his co-host, Chris Mueller, who rarely summoned anything good to say about the young QB. Mueller, to his credit, is at least articulate, as opposed to the caveman elements in the Pittsburgh sports media.
An especially brutal Pickett media critic is vulgarian Mark Madden, who rejoiced in the news of the Pickett trade by thundering “bullsh**t!” (a favorite catch-all expression) at Pickett and grunting that the 26-year-old newlywed had “no balls!” Madden raged at Pickett with crudely characteristic lack of grace:
Small hands, big ego, no balls. Farewell to a gutless coward who’s running away from failure to hide across the state. Anybody doubt that Seattle story now? BIG ***KING BABY. Arrogant w/o accomplishment. I was right all along. HAW, HAW, HAW, HAW! I accept your apologies.
Early in the 2023 season, Madden had so wedded himself to his “Pickett-failure” narrative that even Pickett’s revelatory first game without Matt Canada elicited no credit whatsoever from Madden, who was bent on vindication, screaming out (literally) his view that Kenny Pickett was some sort of vile, cowardly cretin (with no testicles). (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Cabrini: It Gets Worse)
In all, personal attacks like this must have really hurt Pickett, especially given the stunning 180. At the start of the 2023 season, the Pittsburgh crowd was shouting hosannas. By season end, even as his last game before his injury had been terrific — a reality somehow purged from the collective memory bank of the fanbase — the crowd had become a mob ready to chase him out of Pittsburgh with torches and pitchforks. It was a stunning shift to observe, almost inexplicable in its intractable nastiness and forgetfulness.
And thus, with all of that being the case, it sounds as if Kenny Pickett had had enough and asked to be traded last week after the team’s signing of Russell Wilson. He requested to be sent home, to his childhood football team, the Philadelphia Eagles.
If accurate, then that would seem an emotional reaction if not a mistake by Pickett. It’s an understandable rash move by a young athlete who needs to develop emotionally (Bradshaw and Big Ben were perfect examples of that). But far worse is the apparent bigger emotional reaction by the adults in the Steelers organization, from head coach Mike Tomlin to General Manager Omar Khan to owner Art Rooney II. They should have paid a visit to Pickett at his home, sat down privately and charitably and thoughtfully with him and his young wife, calmed him down, waited a few days, even weeks, and aimed to keep in Pittsburgh the planned franchise QB in whom they had invested so much time and faith. Indeed, remarkably, in the preceding weeks, Steelers’ management consistently expressed in public their fullest faith in Pickett. (Click here for an excellent analysis by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review sportswriter Tim Benz.)
But in a way, the failure of these men to keep Pickett is symptomatic of everything they did wrong with him from the outset. They began with the terrible mistake of saddling Pickett with Matt Canada; they finish by letting go a no. 1 draft-pick who at the least would be a solid no. 2 backup to Russell Wilson in 2024. With Pickett, the team had its only remaining QB on the roster who knew the playbook, the players, and could be had at an extraordinarily cheap price. Instead, the brass bailed on Pickett for three draft picks, two of them in the pitiful seventh round.
As for Pickett, in Philadelphia he will backup star QB Jalen Hurts, who’s a year younger. He will play only if Hurts gets injured. Nonetheless, the Philadelphia Eagles have the system and staff to help him succeed. Ironically, the Steelers were finally doing the same, notably with the hiring of Offensive Coordinator Arthur Smith as Matt Canada’s replacement. Smith specialized in precisely the kind of QB scheming and game planning that Pickett had needed.
Still, again, one can understand Pickett’s frustration in wanting to be traded. He deserved far better than what happened to him in this iconic football town. Often in recent weeks, when listening to The Fan or reading sports pages or glimpsing the steady drumbeat of moronic “news” alerts, I muttered to myself, “I hope Kenny Pickett isn’t catching this. These people are crucifying the poor guy.” If I was Pickett and heard trash like that, I would have probably wanted to be traded as well. The astonishing night-and-day shift of loyalty from hero to pariah must have had his head spinning.
In sum, here’s the surreal if not stupid spectacle that Pickett witnessed: Fans and media chased out of town their heroic future franchise QB after a mere sample size of 24 games, which is less than a season and half. Of those 24 games, Pickett won 14, and it’s not right to say he lost 10 because the losses included games where he came in late or left early. His wins often unfolded in dramatic fourth-quarter splashes when he was free of the constraints of Matt Canada’s limited playbook and could let it rip and be himself. Those were some of the most entertaining games of the last two seasons for the team.
Now instead, the team pivots from its prospective franchise replacement of Big Ben to a veteran QB winding up his career with a one-year contract, and who is being greeted as the new conquering hero. One suspects the mob will give Russell Wilson about a six-game trial before turning on him with torches if he doesn’t light the league on fire.
As for Kenny Pickett, we can wish him the best of luck in Philadelphia. It’s hard to imagine the notorious Philly fans treating him kindly there, but then again, it couldn’t be worse than how fans and media turned on him in Pittsburgh.
