PICKETT’S (IN) CHARGE
The star QB revived Pitt football. Can he do the same for Steeler Nation?
On a brisk but sunny morning, all is quiet on Ward Street. The Cathedral of Learning juts into a blue skywithout a cloud in sight, one of tallest buildings in Pittsburgh and the highest point outside of Downtown. It’sabout a mile away, but it feels like you can reach out and touch it from this vantage point, in the deep south of South Oakland where the yards are unkempt andthe homes are not very nice.
This is where Kenny Pickett lived when he captured a campus and a fan base. Now he’ll try to capture a city and a Steeler Nation that stretches around the globe.
A couple of streets over is Parkview Avenue, where Dan Marino grew up and turned himself into the best quarterback the University of Pittsburgh had seen, at least until a fresh-faced kid from New Jersey came around and made it less of a certainty. Five minutes from here, Mr. Pickett prepares to take his first steps as the Steelers’ starting quarterback, at the same practice facility where Pitt and Pittsburgh intersect every day. Anticipation is mounting around the city, with Pickett-themed shirts flooding the Strip District and No. 8 jerseys in both black and gold and royal and gold dotting the streets.
But beyond the fanfare, he’s been walking this path since he knew what football was, the son of a linebacker who
had stars in his eyes to become a quarterback with all the pressure that comes with it — and who put in hours upon hours of work to get there.
“Certain kids, certain players have that ‘it’ factor,” said Jim Cantafio, Mr. Pickett’s first quarterbacks coach when he was in middle school. “I cross my fingers and hope to God he’s got that ‘it’ factor and he’s going to be with the Steelers for so many years to come and have a ton of success.”
On Sunday, when Mr. Pickett makes his first NFL start, he’ll begin writing a story that’s already many chapters in the making.
‘He’s just a gamer’
As more than two dozen reporters and videographerspile into the Steelers locker room, Mr. Pickett sits at his stall, hat on backward, looking inward, literally and perhaps figuratively. He wasn’t speaking to any teammates, almost as if he were steeling himself for a game instead of his first practice since being named the team’sNo. 1 quarterback 24 hours earlier.
Some of his college buddies have said the only time they’ve ever seen him nervous is when he was about to propose to his now-fiancee earlier this year. When it comes to football, the 24year-old who was the first quarterback taken in the 2022 NFL draft has always been confident.
“He’s just a gamer,” said Marcque Ellington, one of Mr. Pickett’s best friends since they were 8. “He locks in. But one thing I do give him, he knows how to have fun while doing everything. He gets into this mode and he’s just having fun out there, but he’s super focused. I don’t know how to even explain it.”
Maybe it’s just that sweet spot where obsession and mental stability meet fearlessness and talent, a recipe that can take any athlete from good to great, but especially a quarterback. Mr. Cantafio, a longtime high school coach in eastern Pennsylvania who’s been running camps for decades, saw it in Mr. Pickett when he first started working with him in sixth grade.
Duringmiddle school, Mr. Pickett was at one of Mr. Cantafio’s clinics for young quarterbacks. Another coach was drawing a diagram on the whiteboard and asked who could identify the defensive front. The first hand that shot up was Mr. Pickett’s, and even if it wasn’t the cool thing to do in that setting, he didn’t mind getting in front of the group to break it all down.
“It just tells you something,” Mr. Cantafio recalled. “And you better believe he knew his stuff.”
There’s video evidence on YouTube of the kid that Mr. Cantafio called “a skinny little marink” doing his thing in the classroom. Another clip online shows Mr. Pickett drawing up how to attack a Cover-3 coverage with four vertical routes.
That’s a cute memory to unearth on the internet — until you find out that in Mr. Pickett’s first varsity victory as a starter in high school, his second game of his sophomore year at Ocean Township in New Jersey, he threw the winning touchdown pass on a 64-yard strike with 2:28 left. The play they ran called for all vertical routes, and he
hit his man down the seam.
“I always knew he would be what he is now,” said Mr. Ellington, who would spend just about every weekend at the Pickett house. “He was short at the time, but he just showed a lot of different leadership characteristics then, so I figured by the time he’s older, it’s just going to come second nature to him. When he was younger, he was still making sure people were doing what they had to do, leading by example, things of that nature.”
In that sense, Mr. Pickett has a way about him that has teammates wanting him to be their quarterback. His first year at Pitt, he wasn’t supposed to see the field as a freshman, but a season-ending injury to senior starter Max Browne threw a wrench into the quarterback depth chart.
By the end of the year, Mr. Pickett had taken the starting job away from redshirt sophomoreBen DiNucci, not unlike his abrupt eclipse of Mitch Trubisky four weeks into this season. But it’s not as if Mr. Pickett was the top dog in his recruiting class or anything. That was actually local Steel Valley High star Paris Ford, who was sold on Mr. Pickett the first time he saw him play in-person — as an early enrollee in Pitt’s 2017 spring game.
“We’re all sitting there watching — me, Jaylen Twyman, Darian Street — I remember it like it was yesterday,” Mr. Ford said last
week. “Both [defensive] ends got off, he did a spin to the sideline, and he threw a dart to, I think, Jester Weah, to the back shoulder. I was like, ‘Bro, did you just see that?’ ”
Mr. Pickett, one of the two quarterbacks not wearing a red no-contact jersey in the scrimmage, took a roughingthe-passer hit on the play.
“I swear,” Mr. Ford said, “that’s when I knew he was going to be nice.”
‘A swag switch’
Whether it was just a coincidence or a DJ very intune with current events, Mr. Pickett’s first practice as an NFL starter had a fitting beginning. As he and his teammates went through stretches Wednesday, the perfect set of lyrics blared from the sideline speakers:
Playtime over, this the big league
Playtime over, this the big league
Nearly five years to the day Pitt burned his redshirt in a game against Syracuse in upstate New York, Mr. Pickett will make his first start against the Buffalo Bills in upstate New York. Ken and Kasey Pickett attended every game back then, just in case their son got his number called, and against all odds, it happened Oct. 7, 2017. The Steelers burned his NFL redshirt last week, and the parallels continue from there.
Mr. Pickett’s first start in college was at home against No. 2-ranked Miami as a
double-digit underdog. His first start in the NFL will be on the road at Buffalo as a double-digit underdog. He led Pitt to a 24-14 upset in that 2017 game, but Panthers coach Pat Narduzzi kept his plan under wraps all week leading up to it. This time around, the whole world knows the Pickett era is upon us in Pittsburgh.
“God bless him,” said Mr. Cantafio, the quarterback guru who helped mold a young Mr. Pickett. “I texted him and basically said: Full speed ahead, keep pushing, stay positive, and I know you’re going to get it done. It’s just that the NFL’s a different process, a different breed of cat. You’re usually going to experience the negatives for a period of time before you ever experience the positives.”
That’s not anything new to Mr. Pickett. After the high of stunning Miami, things were good again for a while his sophomore year, even steering Pitt to its first ACC Coastal Division title that season. During that 2018 training camp, he embraced a leadership role, telling teammates, “You don’t show up for work, that’s how you go 5-7” — their record the year before.
But upon clinching the division crown with a win at Wake Forest, the Panthers finished the season on a three-game losing streak, with Mr. Pickett hitting a nadir of just 8 yards passing and an interception on 4-of-16 passing in a 42-10 ACC championship game loss to Clemson. Yes, it was in a torrential downpour and that Clemson team went on to win the national title with a 15-0 record, but not everyone on the outside was sold on Pitt’s quarterback.
“He had his ups and downs in the city,” Mr. Ford said. “People were saying Kenny sucked, but I always had faith and confidence in him.”
Three seasons later, Mr. Pickett had Pitt back in the ACC title game, and it turned out differently. He completed 20 of 33 passes for 253 yards and two touchdowns in a 42-21 rout of Wake Forest. And yeah, he had that 58-yard touchdown run with a fake slide that resonated throughout the football world.
His steady improvement at Pitt eventually sold coach Mike Tomlin and the Steelers on Mr. Pickett as their first first-round quarterback since Ben Roethlisberger. Mr. Pickett went from a game manager to a Heisman Trophy finalist who had a police escort assigned to him walking in and out of stadiums. He began using an alias when ordering takeout.
“We were just focused on what we had going on,” said Steelers running back Benny Snell when asked if he and his teammates paid much attention to Mr. Pickett’s meteoric rise next door; then he smiled. “But it seemed like Tomlin had his eye over there.”
And Mr. Tomlin has kept a close eye on Mr. Pickett ever since. Even the first month of this season, when Mr. Pickett was getting all his practice reps on the scout team, the coach was watching closely.
“We would go back and forth. If the [defense] made a good play, he would chirp at me a little bit. If I made a big play, I wouldn’t hear him too much, so I’d ask if he was at practice that day,” Mr. Pickett said with a grin. “It was great. It was a great atmosphere to compete.”
“Yeah, ‘Coach T’ is going to talk [expletive] to you,” said backup wide receiver Steven Sims. “Last week, he was talking crap to Kenny. ... He was definitely talking back to him. He said something and, bang, me and Kenny connected on a deepball.”
So that’s what Mr. Tomlin was seeing in practice. Of course, Mr. Pickett began showing that from the moment he threw on a Steelers jersey. Mr. Snell called it “an over-time thing” for Mr. Pickett to build relationships in the locker room, but he can easily recite the first time he realized the rookie had the goods.
It was the second preseason game, at Jacksonville, when Mr. Snell caught a touchdown pass from Mr. Pickett. It was an easy score for Mr. Snell out of the left flat, but it wasn’t luck.
“He called that before it even happened — pre-snap, at the line,” Mr. Snell said. “The defense really wasn’t ready, but he just told me to look real quick, and I looked real quick. He’s very smart. He’s very confident. He’s going to create a wave that we’ll be able to ride.”
It’s the same energy his Pitt brothers saw long ago. Over the course of his time in Oakland, Mr. Pickett transformed from prospect to legend, with plenty of pep talks to teammates and trash talk to opponents in between.
“He’s definitely got a ‘swag switch,’ let me tell you,” said Mr. Ford, who feels the same vibe last week as he did when Mr. Pickett and Pitt shocked Miami. “That’s what you gotta love about a quarterback, especially a young one. You gotta know when to turn it on. He definitely has that dog in him, 110%.”
“He’s very normal — normal, cool, everything,” fellow Steelers rookie Calvin Austin said. “But you can tell, when it’s football, he’s for real about that. He demands everybody to be onpoint with him. You gotta be on-point with him, or he’s going to let you know.”
Now’s the time for Mr. Pickett to mix up all those ingredients — physical skills, football IQ honed over decades, preparation, clutch gene — and put the formula on display for a franchise that beton him and a sports-crazed town that has its collective eyesfixed on the future.
“How you feeling?” Steelers receiver Chase Claypool asked him shortly before his first snap last Sunday in his NFL debut.
“I feel great,” Mr. Pickett replied. “This is where I’m supposed to be.”