There are quarterback performances where you look at the stat sheet afterward and realize a guy had a pretty good night.
Then there are performances where you know it before you ever see the numbers.
Drew Allar's first night in a Pittsburgh Steelers uniform was the second kind.
Ten completions. Thirteen attempts. 153 yards. Two touchdown passes. Another touchdown on the ground. No interceptions. No sacks. A 154.8 passer rating.
Those are the numbers.
They aren't the story.
The story is how ridiculously normal all of it looked.
The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Green Bay Packers 28-9 Thursday night at Acrisure Stadium, and in a preseason opener that featured three Pittsburgh quarterbacks playing well, it was the rookie third-round pick from Penn State who walked away owning the conversation. Pittsburgh's quarterbacks combined to complete 27 of 33 passes for 332 yards without throwing an interception. Mason Rudolph went 10-of-11. Will Howard went 7-of-9. This wasn't a night where Allar stood out because everybody around him was terrible.
He stood out because everybody around him was good, and he somehow made himself impossible to ignore.
And if you've watched Steelers quarterback play over the last few years, there was something almost jarring about it.
Drew Allar made playing quarterback look easy.
That sentence shouldn't feel revolutionary in Pittsburgh.
Right now, it kind of does.
The Part the Box Score Doesn't Tell You
Let's get the mandatory disclaimer out of the way.
It is preseason.
Green Bay wasn't throwing its full defensive package at him. Allar wasn't facing a January blitz package with Myles Garrett coming off one side and the season hanging on third-and-eight. Nobody should be fitting him for a gold jacket because he carved up backups in August.
Fine.
Now that we've behaved responsibly for a paragraph, can we talk about what actually happened?
Because preseason football may not tell you whether a quarterback is going to become a franchise quarterback.
It can absolutely tell you whether the moment looks too big for him.
It didn't look remotely too big for Drew Allar.
There was no frantic energy to his game. No sense that he was trying to prove he belonged on every snap. No bouncing around waiting for something to happen. No constant hesitation between what his eyes were telling him and what his arm was doing.
The ball came out.
Receivers were where he expected them to be.
His feet looked connected to his eyes.
And when Pittsburgh moved the ball, it felt less like a rookie quarterback manufacturing offense and more like somebody simply operating it.
That's an important distinction.
We've spent several seasons watching Steelers offenses where completing a seven-yard pass somehow felt like solving a Rubik's Cube underwater.
Thursday night, Allar just played quarterback.
Then Came the Throw
Allar entered with Pittsburgh trailing 9-7 late in the third quarter.
A rookie quarterback. His first NFL game action. First snap in Acrisure Stadium wearing black and gold.
And then he found Kaden Wetjen.
Wetjen worked from the slot, got separation, Allar put the football where it needed to go and suddenly the rookie receiver was flying down the field for 74 yards before being dragged down at the Green Bay 3-yard line.
Two plays later, Pittsburgh called a read option.
Allar kept it.
Touchdown.
Steelers lead.
Welcome to Pittsburgh.
But the 74-yarder wasn't actually the part of Allar's night I liked most.
Big plays happen in preseason games. A defensive back takes a bad angle, somebody misses an assignment and suddenly a seven-yard completion becomes 74.
What happened next mattered more.
Green Bay got the football back.
Pittsburgh got another stop.
And Allar came back onto the field and led an 89-yard touchdown drive.
Ten plays.
Methodical.
Controlled.
No fireworks required.
He completed seven of eight passes on the march and eventually found Wetjen again, this time for a five-yard touchdown.
That's quarterbacking.
The long one showed the arm and the opportunity.
The next drive showed the player.
Then, because apparently three touchdowns were necessary before Mike McCarthy would let the kid go home, Allar later led another 60-yard scoring drive and hit rookie fullback Riley Nowakowski for a four-yard touchdown with 1:46 remaining.
Final score: Pittsburgh 28, Green Bay 9.
Three touchdown drives with Drew Allar directing the offense.
In his first NFL game.
Again: preseason.
Also again: pay attention.
This Is Where Kenny Pickett Enters the Conversation
I know what some Steelers fans are going to say.
We've done this before.
And they're right.
In fact, Kenny Pickett's first preseason appearance was excellent.
People have conveniently rewritten that part of history.
Pickett went 13-of-15 for 95 yards and two touchdowns in his 2022 preseason debut against Seattle. He finished it by leading a game-winning touchdown drive and throwing the winning score with three seconds remaining. His passer rating was 132.6.
Acrisure Stadium was losing its mind.
People left that game believing the Steelers might have found the next one.
So I'm not going to sit here and tell you Drew Allar had a good August night and therefore he's Ben Roethlisberger.
We've watched that movie.
But there is something different that deserves to be discussed.
It's the ease.
Kenny Pickett's biggest problem in Pittsburgh wasn't that he couldn't complete passes. He could. It wasn't that he never won games. He did. Pittsburgh went 14-10 in his starts over his two seasons here.
The problem was that almost everything looked hard.
The pocket looked crowded.
Windows looked small.
Pressure felt immediate.
Reads seemed to take half a beat longer than you wanted.
The offense became a weekly exercise in trying to survive until the fourth quarter, keep the score within six points and hope Pickett could manufacture something late.
He occasionally did.
That's how we wound up with the strange Kenny Pickett experience where his supporters could point to legitimate fourth-quarter heroics while everybody else watching the first three quarters wondered why scoring 20 points felt like climbing Mount Washington without the incline.
In two seasons with Pittsburgh, Pickett threw 13 touchdown passes in 25 games.
Thirteen.
He threw six touchdowns in 12 games in 2023.
The Steelers still went 7-5 in his starts that season because this franchise possesses some sort of supernatural ability to win football games while its offense is being held together with duct tape.
Drew Allar threw two touchdown passes Thursday night and ran for another.
That's not a statistical comparison. One is a preseason game against backups and the other is regular-season NFL football.
I'm talking about how it looked.
Allar is 6-foot-5.
He stands back there and looks like an NFL quarterback before the ball is even snapped.
Then the ball leaves his hand and the physical difference becomes even more obvious.
He doesn't appear to need his entire body to generate velocity. He can drive the football without looking like he's putting everything he owns into the throw. The release looks natural. The field doesn't seem enormous around him.
That's what caught my attention.
For years, watching the Steelers offense felt claustrophobic.
Thursday night, when No. 16 was standing back there, the field suddenly looked big again.
Nobody Appeared to Tell Allar He Was Supposed to Be Nervous
There is another part of this I can't get away from.
This kid was making his NFL debut.
Allar played his college football at Penn State, so he's certainly familiar with enormous crowds and pressure. Beaver Stadium isn't exactly a quiet Saturday afternoon at the park.
The NFL is still different.
New offense.
New terminology.
NFL defensive speed.
New coaching staff.
New teammates.
And a quarterback room containing Aaron Rodgers, Mason Rudolph and Will Howard.
That's a lot of information rattling around inside a rookie quarterback's head.
You couldn't see it.
Afterward, Allar credited practicing against Pittsburgh's defense every day for helping prepare him mentally for the game.
Maybe that's part of Mike McCarthy's influence already.
McCarthy has made quarterback development one of the central themes of this camp. This is a coach who has spent decades teaching the position, and suddenly Pittsburgh has something it hasn't had in a very long time:
A legitimate quarterback development pipeline.
Aaron Rodgers is QB1.
Behind him is Mason Rudolph, who knows how to operate an NFL offense.
Then you've got Will Howard, who desperately needs developmental snaps after losing almost his entire rookie season to injury.
Then Drew Allar.
For years Pittsburgh's quarterback plan seemed to consist of acquiring somebody, handing him a Matt Canada playbook and hoping for divine intervention.
This feels different.
And Will Howard Deserves His Paragraph
Allar stole the night.
That shouldn't erase what Will Howard did.
Howard's first series wasn't particularly memorable, but then Pittsburgh got the ball with 1:53 remaining in the first half.
This is where things became interesting.
The Steelers have been drilling the two-minute offense throughout training camp.
Howard got an actual two-minute situation.
And he delivered.
Eight plays.
Eighty yards.
He converted a fourth-and-one with a 17-yard completion to Ben Skowronek, then found Robert Tonyan on three consecutive passes for gains of 16, 15 and 22 yards. The final reception was initially ruled a touchdown before replay placed Tonyan just short of the goal line.
Lew Nichols punched it in one play later.
Pittsburgh went 80 yards in 1:07.
Howard finished 7-of-9 for 86 yards with a 106.5 rating.
No touchdowns on the stat sheet.
But anybody watching that two-minute drive knows he created one.
That's a really good night for Will Howard.
And suddenly Pittsburgh has the kind of quarterback problem you actually want to have.
Rudolph Was Nearly Perfect Too
Mason Rudolph deserves mention because otherwise we'd be ignoring a quarterback who completed 10 of 11 passes.
Rudolph finished with 93 yards and a 101.9 rating.
His first possession went nowhere.
His second looked significantly better, aided by second-round receiver Germie Bernard, who caught three passes for 44 yards on that drive.
So if we're keeping score at home:
Mason Rudolph: 10-of-11.
Will Howard: 7-of-9.
Drew Allar: 10-of-13.
Collectively: 27-of-33 for 332 yards.
That's an 81.8 percent completion rate.
Pittsburgh quarterbacks threw two touchdowns, zero interceptions and produced a combined passer rating of 128.8.
Mike McCarthy's first preseason game as Steelers head coach could have gone worse.
Slightly.
The Quarterback Room Might Be the Story of Camp
This is where things become fascinating.
The Steelers don't need Drew Allar to start.
They don't even need him to be QB2 right now.
Aaron Rodgers is here for the present. Pittsburgh brought him back to try to win football games in 2026.
That gives Allar something Kenny Pickett never really had.
Time.
Pickett was drafted 20th overall in 2022 into a franchise desperate to replace Ben Roethlisberger. Every training camp throw was viewed through that lens. Every preseason game became a referendum. Mitch Trubisky was technically the veteran starter, but everybody knew what was coming.
The clock started the second Pickett walked into the building.
Allar is different.
He was taken in the third round.
Nobody needs him to save the franchise Sunday morning.
He gets to learn Mike McCarthy's offense.
He gets to sit in the same quarterback room as Aaron Rodgers.
He gets NFL coaching without the entire city demanding he become QB1 immediately.
And while that's happening, Will Howard gets to develop too.
This is how you're supposed to build a quarterback room.
Draft talent.
Develop it.
Create competition.
Don't force the timeline.
And if one of them eventually makes the decision for you?
Even better.
Don't Crown Him. Don't Ignore Him Either.
There will be two predictable reactions to Thursday night.
One side will decide Drew Allar is the future starting quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The other will become so terrified of looking like an overreacting fan that they'll insist the performance meant absolutely nothing.
Both are lazy.
Of course it meant something.
It just didn't mean everything.
We learned that the NFL stage didn't swallow him.
We learned the arm translates.
We learned he can command the offense.
We learned he can put together sustained drives instead of living entirely on splash plays.
We learned that when Pittsburgh got near the end zone, he finished drives.
We learned that his first response to playing professional football wasn't panic.
Those things matter.
They matter even in August.
Maybe next week he throws two interceptions and looks every bit like a rookie. Maybe defensive coordinators eventually find something on film that bothers him. Maybe the development takes two years.
That's what development is.
But Thursday gave Pittsburgh something it hasn't had much of at quarterback since Ben Roethlisberger walked away.
Intrigue without desperation.
Nobody needs Drew Allar to be the answer tomorrow.
For the first time in a while, though, it's reasonable to wonder whether the answer might already be in the building.
The Throwing Motion Isn't What I'll Remember
Here's what I'm going to remember from Drew Allar's first game.
Not the 74-yard completion.
Not the three touchdowns.
Not the 154.8 quarterback rating.
It was the absence of struggle.
Football looked simple.
Snap.
Read.
Throw.
Move the chains.
Do it again.
That's what great quarterbacks eventually do to you as a viewer. They distort your understanding of how difficult the position actually is.
Roethlisberger used to stand in a collapsing pocket with a 280-pound defensive lineman hanging off his shoulder and somehow make third-and-nine look like a mildly annoying inconvenience.
We're nowhere remotely close to making that comparison with Drew Allar.
One preseason game does not buy admission into that conversation.
But Steelers fans know the opposite feeling too.
We've spent enough Sundays watching quarterbacks make routine offense feel like advanced calculus.
And that's why Thursday night felt different.
Drew Allar didn't look like a rookie desperately trying to prove he could play quarterback in the NFL.
He looked like a quarterback who happened to be playing his first NFL game.
There's a difference.
A big one.
The Steelers shouldn't change a single thing about their plan because of one August night.
Rodgers starts.
Rudolph and Howard battle.
Allar learns.
McCarthy teaches.
Let the kid stack practices and preseason snaps and months of quarterback school without putting the weight of Pittsburgh's next decade on his shoulders.
But somewhere inside the Steelers facility Friday morning, somebody is going to turn on that film.
They're going to watch No. 16 stand in the pocket.
They're going to watch the ball come out.
They're going to watch three touchdown drives.
And they're going to ask themselves the same question Steelers fans were asking by the fourth quarter Thursday night.
Wait a minute.
What exactly did we get in the third round?
