The Pittsburgh Steelers urgency to become a championship caliber team has created a short leash for quarterback Kenny Pickett.
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00:00 it's where the Steelers are more than where Kenny Pickett is. I think if the Steelers were in a bad
00:03 spot and they were still developing and you kind of had to talk them up a little bit,
00:09 you would look at Kenny Pickett and say, "Why would you not give him a third opportunity? That
00:14 just makes a lot of sense." But you kind of looked at last season and you said immediately,
00:18 "There are two major flaws here that are really holding the Steelers back, and that is Matt
00:26 Canada and the quarterback play." And you hoped that Kenny Pickett improved after Matt Canada
00:31 left. That wasn't the case, and I don't blame Kenny for that. I mean, he really only got one
00:37 game post-Canada. I mean, one and a half usually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had the Bengals game and
00:43 then... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then he got hurt. And even so, the Bengals game, he looked
00:47 good, but you got Eddie Faulkner and Mike Sullivan as your co-offensive coordinators.
00:54 Like, I don't think he's ever had... I don't think we could ever move on from the fact that
00:58 he's never had a good OC, and I think we use that as excuses for other players, like Justin Fields,
01:03 for example. But I think that, again, where the Steelers are, there is an actual sense of urgency.
01:08 There is an actual sense of, "This team can be really good, but you need a quarterback." And
01:14 when you... If you were missing a center or a right tackle or a wide receiver or an inside linebacker
01:21 or whatever, you could look at those positions and say, "Well, you have Spencer Anderson," which
01:26 I don't know if you saw, because Spencer Anderson, Ray Fittipaldo, Post Gazette said that he's a
01:30 candidate to start at right tackle. Shout out to your boy right there. If you looked at other
01:36 positions and said, "That is our only position to need, but we have a Spencer Anderson, a Mark
01:42 Robinson, a Corey Trice, a whoever, somebody who..." And say these guys were drafted higher, but
01:49 you have somebody like that where they are coming along, but there's still some hiccups here.
01:55 You look at it and you say, "All right. Well, you give them one more year because you work well."
02:02 But you could win a Super Bowl with a bad right tackle. You could win a Super Bowl with a bad
02:06 inside linebacker or bad safety or bad corner. You could not, and it has never happened,
02:11 win a Super Bowl with a bad quarterback. And there have been some eh quarterbacks,
02:16 but you cannot, you just can't win a Super Bowl in today's day and age with a bad quarterback,
02:20 especially when you got the Kansas City Chiefs and all the things that they do.
02:24 And you just never know when you're going to be in a gunfight and you're going to have to
02:29 shoot out with guys like Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes or the 49ers or whoever. You just don't
02:36 know when that's going to happen. So I think the position just makes that sense of urgency so much
02:41 higher that, yeah, it's a quarterback. You judge them differently and you judge them a lot more
02:45 harshly, but that's just the nature of the game. That's where Kenny Pickett's been,
02:50 and that's where he is right now.