How Much Can Kenny Pickett Improve This Season?

PITTSBURGH — Kenny Pickett has not yet been great as the Pittsburgh Steelers starting quarterback to the midpoint of his rookie season. He hasn’t even really been good. 

The Steelers’ first-round pick is 35th in the NFL with a 66.8 passer rating. That’s out of 35 qualifiers. He’s also dead last among qualifying passers with 3.19 adjusted net yards per attempt. QBR is slightly more forgiving, placing him 27th.

Some of that has been bad luck due to some interceptions that weren’t necessarily Pickett’s fault. Some of it has also been due to an offensive scheme under coordinator Matt Canada that hasn’t exactly lit the NFL on fire in a season and a half.

But Pickett hasn’t even been as good as the other quarterbacks that have plied their trade for Canada. Of the four Pittsburgh passers since the start of the 2021 season, Pickett’s passer rating is the worst, with Ben Roethlisberger (86.8), Mitch Trubisky (80.1) and Mason Rudolph (70.8) all comfortably ahead.

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Pickett is a rookie quarterback, and like most, will go through a learning curve. One of his mentors, Peyton Manning, had a 71.2 passer rating as a rookie and threw an NFL-record 28 interceptions. 

So Picket is likely to get better. But the timeline on that improvement is far from certain. It might come in the second half of his rookie season, and it might not. Manning improved from a 64.5 passer rating in the first half of his rookie season to 78.1 in the second half.

But that’s a fairly incremental increase, and with respect to Pickett, he’s not Manning. There’s a big difference between the No. 20 overall draft pick and No. 2.

So what should fans expect to see Pickett do better in the second half of the season than he did in the first?

“I think improvement is taking mistakes off the tape that have occurred prior to that,” Canada said this week. 

The most notable of those improvements would be cutting down on the interceptions. Pickett has had a couple go off the hands of his receivers, and two weeks in a row has gotten into game scenarios where he had to force the ball down field, regardless of the consequences. 

But the totality is a 4.8% interception rate, second-worst in the NFL. Pickett doesn’t need to be among the league leaders in that category as a rookie, but for a quarterback with above average accuracy (he’s sixth-best in completion percentage), he can be much, much better in that regard.

“A lot of quarterbacks that have gotten drafted in the first round have come in their first year and it has maybe not been as rosy as everybody has hoped and it’s turned out to be really good, right?” Canada said. “There’s statistical data to that. That doesn’t make it OK right now. We’re not all sitting here like, ‘oh, it’s fine,’ and he’s not either. We want him to get better every day. We want that for everybody. Kenny is the quarterback and he’s the focal point, but that goes for everybody.”