1. Peered pressure
The Pittsburgh Steelers didn’t need to fool anybody to pressure the opposing quarterback in Week 1. Their Week 2 opponent took the opposite approach in its opener.
While only two of the 32 teams on the NFL’s opening weekend blitzed less often than the Steelers did during their win at Atlanta, no team dialed up the blitz more often than the Denver Broncos did during their Sept. 8 loss at Seattle. According to pro-football-reference.com, the Broncos tied Las Vegas for the highest blitz percentage in Week 1 at 42.9%. The Steelers blitzed Atlanta’s Kirk Cousins on only 10.7% of his dropbacks, a rate higher than only Houston (8.3%) and San Francisco (9.7%) used in their openers.
Why did the Steelers belie their “Blitzburgh” identity? Simply put, because they didn’t have to. According to Sharp Football Analysis, the Steelers had the second-best Week 1 pressure rate of any in the NFL when not blitzing.
Pressuring quarterbacks is always a priority, but in the case of Sunday’s QB matchup, it takes on a heightened importance. When he was pressured during his NFL debut last week in Seattle, Broncos quarterback Bo Nix was awful: 7 for 15 for 20 yards and an interception for 1.3 yards per pass attempt.
Steelers quarterback Justin Fields fared better in Week 1 when pressured: 2 for 3 for 49 yards with one scramble and two sacks. But last season while playing for Chicago, Fields had the third-worst yards per attempt (5.1) when pressured among any quarterback who played at least 10 games
2. Picking Pickens
A major narrative over the Steelers offseason and training camp was the perceived lack of alternative in the receiving corps to clear new No. 1 George Pickens.
Week 1 did little to dispel that notion.
Among the wide receivers, Pickens accounted for seven of the 11 targeted throws and a whopping 91% of the receiving yards gained. Even with the tight ends taken into account (still leaving out running backs), Pickens had 63% of the yards gained in the Steelers passing game against the Falcons.
But when analyzing the share of the throws to Pickens as opposed to everyone else in the Steelers offense last week by using targeted air yards, the discrepancy becomes even more stark. According to Next Gen Stats, balls thrown to Pickens accounted for 75.2% of the distance that all 23 of Fields’ passes traveled downfield. That was easily the highest share for one pass-catcher in the NFL for Week 1.
The general perception that Pickens is the only true big-play threat the Steelers have bared itself out in the season opener. Per Pro Football Focus, Pickens ranked fourth among all NFL wide receivers who had at least four targets in Week 1 in yards per route run (3.86).
3. Taking time
Since entering the league in 2021, Fields has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of Next Gen’s average time to throw metric. As a rookie, his 2.91-second average from snap to pass attempt was tied for the sixth-longest, then in 2022 his 3.12-second average was fourth and then last season the 3.23 average time to throw was easily the league’s most.
In his Steelers debut last week, Fields once again was tracked as holding onto the ball much longer than the average passer. At 3.06 seconds, only three quarterbacks during Week 1 had a longer average time to throw.
This tendency undoubtedly can sometimes lead to positive outcomes and can at times measure a quarterback’s ability to improvise and make plays. But it also correlates to Fields enduring an NFL-most 137 sacks since he entered the league.
4. All or nothing
The raw stats say seven of Najee Harris’ 20 carries in Atlanta went for 2 or fewer yards, while three went for more than 5 yards. But the analytics from Next Gen pinpoint one (in the parlance of its website) “remarkable rush” — and 19 other mostly ordinary carries.
Harris’ game-high 20-yard run early during the fourth quarter provided 16 rush yards over expected (RYOE) — a formula devised that aims to represent how much a running back over- or under-delivers on a carry. But Harris’ other 19 runs combined for minus-10 RYOE.
If Harris had taken just that one long carry, he would have finished in the top eight of RYOE among all NFL running backs in Week 1. But … if he had only taken all 19 of the other carries, he would have had the 10th-worst RYOE for opening weekend.
Chris Adamski is a TribLive reporter who has covered primarily the Pittsburgh Steelers since 2014 following two seasons on the Penn State football beat. A Western Pennsylvania native, he joined the Trib in 2012 after spending a decade covering Pittsburgh sports for other outlets. He can be reached at cadamski@triblive.com.