Behind the Steel Curtain
Ranking every quarterback on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ schedule
The Pittsburgh Steelers have an off day today, but will return to the practice field on Tuesday, and Behind The Steel Curtain will be there.
In the meantime, we look ahead to the regular season and the signal-callers that Pittsburgh will face when the calendar officially flips from August to September. From worst-to-best, here are my rankings of every quarterback the Steelers will face in 2025.
It’s likely that the Steelers will face multiple Browns quarterbacks in 2025, considering all of them are bad. For story purposes, I’d love to watch Kenny Pickett stroll into Acrisure in Week 6 and get sacked by T.J. Watt in a blowout loss.
Richardson is a physical specimen, but he only completed 47 percent of his passes in 2024, which is impressively bad. Speaking of impressively bad, hello Daniel Jones. If the Steelers let one of these two beat them, they should be ashamed.
He’s practically still a rookie, and he wasn’t asked to do a lot at Michigan. There will be some Jimmy Garoppolo-Kyle Shanahan similarities with McCarthy and Kevin O’Connell in which McCarthy will play above his means in large part due to a great head coach and great supporting cast.
Darnold rode lightning last year until the spark finally faded in the team’s final two weeks, leading to an ugly wild card exit after a 14-3 season. With a far less talented corps of receivers, as well as playing sans Kevin O’Connell in his ear, Darnold comes back down to Earth.
The best days of Tua are in the past, and even the best days’ ceiling was getting blown out by the Chiefs in the wild card round. If temperatures dip below 70 degrees, the Dolphins fold. They play the Steelers in December - good luck.
I like Fields. I wanted the Steelers to give him the year to show whether or not he could be the guy. His mobility is his greatest strength. Things get very sporadic in the passing game, though, which isn’t a great trait to have when you’re a quarterback.
There are plenty of quarterbacks that when I see them on the schedule, I go, “How are they going to stop him?” Jared Goff isn’t one of those guys. He’s in the upper half of starters in the NFL, but he doesn’t strike fear, especially now that Ben Johnson is gone. The Lions’ roster is intimidating; their quarterback is not.
The Bears were a tire fire coaching-wise in 2024, but Caleb Williams still put up 20 touchdown passes to just six interceptions. He needs to take far fewer sacks, but there’s a lot of promise there. I’ll...
