On a second-and-7 with just over seven minutes remaining, Justin Fields hurled a dart into a moving wall of Los Angeles Chargers defenders. To many of us, the coverage may have seemed like a drunken hall of mirrors with bodies sliding left and right, but for Fields, it’s starting to look see It is essential to find your intended target in the smallest gap.
Calvin Austin III carried that pass 55 yards for a touchdown, giving the Pittsburgh Steelers a 20-10 lead that the Chargers couldn’t catch with Justin Herbert out with an ankle injury. The Steelers haven’t lost a game in which Fields has started, and while all three of those games were wins for the defensive forward team, Sunday’s game against the Chargers featured the kind of complete quarterback performance from Fields that should put the lid on Fields’ victory. any ongoing quarterback controversy.
We could give you the stats on that game. Fields had a Completion Percentage Over Expectation (CPOE) of +10.2. Despite playing twice as many snaps as Herbert, he also nearly doubled Herbert’s QBR (65.9 to 36.6). Fields didn’t throw an incomplete pass until the second quarter, and even then the pass was dropped.
But when it comes to the often mysterious methods of Pittsburgh and Mike Tomlin, a coach who seems to rely more than anyone on the unpredictable emotions of the locker room and the ability of his players to make decisions that meet an unknown but absolute standard, we learned everything we needed to know about his thoughts on Fields on Sunday.
For one thing, he had the ball in his hands on that second-and-7 throw at the end of the fourth quarter. Fields started that decisive drive by throwing the football. The run-pass ratio was 2:3 before the touchdown. It’s not unfair to say that the Steelers of 2023, or maybe even the Steelers of Week 1 this year, would have seen Herbert taken out of the game and held on to that three-point lead tighter than the handle on a wakeboard rope. Just run down the clock, force the Chargers to call timeouts, and let TJ Watt beat Taylor Heinicke into unconsciousness.
The Steelers did the same before halftime. Pittsburgh was only three points behind and knew they would have possession after halftime, so Fields was given the green light to move the ball with less than 50 seconds left on the clock. Although the drive ended with a missed 62-yard field goal, a 27-yard pass to George Pickens put the Steelers in the conversation for points.
Anyone who sits at home and takes this for granted is ignoring the bigger picture. So far, 2024 has been the season of the hidden quarterback. To hell with Mel Kiperthe prevalence of two-high defenses—which we wrote about two years ago Before all this hand-wringing started – make offensive conservatism the preferred path. Play good defense, run the ball efficiently and complement that with the pass against heavier boxes.
We’ve already seen a handful of games this season that were doomed by confusing quarterback play (I’m looking at you, Tennessee Titans) or unnecessary quarterback use. Cough, Philadelphia EaglesCough.
That is Mike Tomlin we’re talking about, and he chose one of the most controversial moments of the young season to give Fields the kind of responsibility we haven’t seen from a Steelers quarterback since Ben Roethlisberger. Maybe not an invitation to win the game, but an invitation to play without fear of losing it.
That’s always been the advantage of playing Fields instead of Russell Wilson, and it will continue to be the advantage going forward. You can’t expect Fields to rise in a perfectly linear progression, but you can expect games like this to become the norm. It’s possible that as Pittsburgh’s running and passing games become more integrated, Fields will combine more of the sharpshooting skills we saw on Sunday with his world-class athleticism.
If Tomlin believes the only way Fields can continue to grow is to keep threatening to bench him for Wilson, so be it. If we need to keep up this charade jokingly so that everyone else in the locker room understands how precarious their own positions are, then that’s fine. But deep down, Tomlin must know that Fields passed his most important behavioral tests on Sunday. And deep down, he knows how ridiculous it would be to give up Pittsburgh’s best chance to get a stranglehold on the AFC North.
