It’s Clear Justin Fields Has Won the Steelers’ Starting Job

On a second-and-7 with a little more than seven minutes left to play, Justin Fields hurled a dart into a shifting wall of Los Angeles Chargers defenders. For the lot of us, the coverage might have resembled drunken funhouse mirrors, bodies gliding left and right, but for Fields of late, it’s beginning to look elementary to find his intended target amid the slightest opening.

Calvin Austin III took that pass 55 yards for a touchdown and gave the Pittsburgh Steelers a 20–10 lead that, with Justin Herbert sidelined by an ankle injury, was impossible for the Chargers to chip away at. The Steelers have not lost a game in which Fields has started, and while all three of these games have been defense-forward wins, Sunday’s game against the Chargers featured the kind of complete quarterbacking effort from Fields that should close the lid on any lingering quarterback controversy. 

We could stuff statistics from this one down your throat. Fields had a completion percentage over expectation (CPOE) of +10.2. While he played double the snaps of Herbert, he also nearly doubled Herbert’s QBR (65.9 to 36.6). Fields didn’t throw an incompletion until the second quarter, and even then, the pass was dropped. 

But when it comes to the oft-mysterious ways of Pittsburgh and Mike Tomlin, a coach who, more than seemingly any other, relies on the incalculable emotional sentiment of the locker room and his players’ ability to measure up to some unknowable but absolute standard in his decision making, we learned all we needed to know about his thoughts about Fields on Sunday. 

For one, the ball was in his hands for that second-and-7 throw at the end of the fourth quarter. Fields began that pivotal drive by throwing the football. The run-pass ratio was 2:3 before the touchdown. It’s not unfair to suggest that the Steelers of 2023, or maybe even the Steelers of Week 1 this year, would have seen that Herbert was sidelined and held onto that three-point lead tighter than the grip on a wakeboard rope. Just run the clock down, force the Chargers to use timeouts and let T.J. Watt pummel Taylor Heinicke into oblivion.

The Steelers did the same before the half. Trailing by just three and knowing they’d get possession after the break, Pittsburgh gave Fields the green light to move the ball with less than 50 seconds on the clock. While the drive ended with a missed 62-yard field goal, it featured a 27-yard pass to George Pickens that got the Steelers into the conversation for points. 

Those sitting at home and treating this as obvious are ignoring the bigger picture. So far this year, 2024 has been the season of the hidden quarterback. Mel Kiper be damned, the prevalence of two-high defenses—which we wrote about two years ago before all this hand wringing began—make offensive conservatism the preferential route. Play good defense, run the ball efficiently and supplement with the pass against heavier boxes. 

We have seen a handful of games already this season doomed by befuddling quarterback play—looking at you, Tennessee Titans—or the unnecessary utilization of the quarterback. Cough, Philadelphia Eagles, cough.   

This is Mike Tomlin we’re talking about here, and he chose one of the most adversarial points of the young season to hand Fields the kind of responsibility we have not seen a Steelers quarterback take on since Ben Roethlisberger. Maybe not a request to go win the game but an invitation to play without the fear of losing it. 

This was always the benefit of playing Fields over Russell Wilson, and it will continue to be the benefit moving forward. It’s impossible to expect Fields to ascend on some sort of perfectly linear progression, but it’s possible to believe that games such as this can become commonplace. It’s possible that, the more integrated Pittsburgh’s run and pass games become, the more Fields is going to blend some of the pocket sharpshooting we saw Sunday with his world-class athleticism. 

If Tomlin believes the only way to keep Fields growing is to keep alive the threat of benching him for Wilson, so be it. If we have to jokingly continue this charade in order for everyone else in the locker room to understand the tenuous nature of their own positions, fine. But deep down, Tomlin has to know that Fields passed his most critical behavioral tests Sunday. And deep down, he knows how ridiculous it would be to abandon the best chance Pittsburgh has to take a stranglehold on the AFC North.