Gene Collier: Can Russell Wilson keep up with the best of the AFC North?

Gene Collier / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Seven weeks deep in a NFL season noticeably warped by its presumably guileless schedule makers, only one game prior to Oct. 20 matched teams that represent what Mike Tomlin lovingly calls AFC North football.

One.

How or why that would be is a matter best left to the software jockeys on Park Avenue, but at least that one episode was a dilly, as Baltimore and Cincinnati met Oct. 6 in Ohio and rang up nearly 80 points between them, the Ravens slipping away with a 41-38 victory in overtime.

While it’s rare to be this far into an NFL campaign with so little empirical evidence gathered as to the nature of the annual AFC North power struggle, the Steelers seem about to separate themselves from the pack in at least one little slice of esoterica: they can be the first among the gang of four to start a backup quarterback, even if he’s more like a front-up quarterback.

Back to the front was the slogan of the week around here, as nine-time Pro Bowler Russell Wilson was ready to take over for 25-year-old Justin Fields, who started Pittsburgh’s first six games and had the club tied for first place.

In his contemplations, Tomlin had to understand a kind of ominous reality. The Steelers had scored 11 touchdowns thus far in 2024, and he was pondering the removal of the player who’d run for five of them and passed for five of the other six. Yet I suspect what he found particularly ominous was the first part of that sentence — 11 touchdowns in 24 quarters, which translates to about one every 33 minutes of game clock, and maybe he figures his offense should be more efficient than a PRT bus, particularly on Sundays.

It’s mostly Pittsburgh’s pass offense, ranked 28th out of 32, that forced Fields to admit this week that he hasn’t played well enough to keep Wilson on the sideline, even if Fields needn’t have taken full responsibility.

“You appreciate that about him,” said offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, who bears some of the blame along with his unreliable wideouts. “Nobody wants to be a martyr, but I mean, I am even guilty of it at times. We're all messed up in the head a little bit.

“I think his confidence should be high. He's 4-2. He's been pretty productive.”

But there’s a broader, still more ominous reality when it comes to quarterback play in the AFC North. If Wilson plays, and he’s healthy, and he proves highly capable even in the month before he turns 36, he merely has a decent chance to be the third best passer in the division, just like Justin Fields.

And that will soon enough become evident. Due to the, um, unusual schedule, when the Steelers do finally reach the AFC North entanglements November 17 against the Ravens, they’ll be looking at six intra-divisional games in the season’s final eight weeks, when the quarterback comparisons will be downright determinative.

As we work toward the nub of October then, all that is certain in these comparisons is that Cleveland is, as they say politely, screwed. It’s not just that the Browns are 1-5, it’s more that they’re on the hook for $230 million for Deshaun Watson, who since 2021, maybe you’ve noted, has more settled sexual assault cases (23) than touchdown passes (19). The Browns sent six draft picks to Houston for Watson, including three first-rounders, and their main objective for the rest of this 1-5 autumn is figuring out a way to rid themselves of this heartache. Watson still hasn’t thrown for even 200 yards in game. In two of them, he couldn’t not complete a pass of 20 yards.

At the other end of competence in this matter are the Ravens’ Lamar Jackson and the Bengals’ Joe Burrow, both elite talents, both Super Bowl capable, and both only 27.

Some of the best evidence of quarterback imbalance in the AFC North can be found in one metric tracked by Pro Football Reference — passing success percentage, which posits that a successful pass gains 40% of the necessary yards on first down, 60% on second, and 100% on third. Currently, Tampa Bay’s Baker Mayfield is No. 1 in the entire league that metric at 54.4. Burrow is 2, Jackson 3. Fields is 23, Watson 31.

Last year, Jackson was 8th, and Russell Wilson of the Broncos was 24th. The year before, Burrow was 6th and Wilson 33rd.

It’s no wonder that Cincinnati has scored 21% more points than the Steelers and Baltimore 30% more. Jackson, a two-time MVP, led Baltimore to 13 wins a year ago on league best point differential of plus-203.

That’s what moved to Tomlin to note how competitive the league is this week and that “we’ve got a player [Wilson] who hasn’t had an opportunity to play, so we’re going to potentially explore those things.”

I’ve always admired Wilson, to be clear, finding him ever-resourceful and clever, even gifted. I was privileged to be an eyewitness the day he and the Seahawks scalded the Peyton Manning-led Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, 43-8, but that was 10 years ago.

Wilson might well be the catalyst that leads Tomlin’s much-improved team into the delayed AFC North conflagration, but Jackson and Burrow, well, them he ain’t.