Winners of four consecutive, riding the wave of a new veteran starting quarterback and deploying the firepower to make a pair of recent two-score comeback wins, the Pittsburgh Steelers offense should be feeling pretty good about itself.
But even as these Steelers shed a recent handful of seasons of mediocre, plodding offense and develop a more representative NFL unit, can they keep up with the league’s best at scoring points?
The rival Baltimore Ravens lead the NFL in scoring offense, and over the stretch of seven wins in eight games they carry into Sunday’s 1 p.m. game at Acrisure Stadium the Ravens have averaged 34.4 points per game.
That’s a figure the Steelers have surpassed just once in almost exactly three calendar years.
“I think that we can definitely score points,” quarterback Russell Wilson said, “and we can do some special things.”
Since Wilson took over as starter, the Steelers are 3-0 and averaging 30.3 points per game. That’s a marked improvement over the types of scores the Steelers were putting up in 2022 and 2023 when they averaged a combined 18.0 points per game and ranked 26th and 28th in the league in scoring offense.
“Our goal is to score more points than they do,” Wilson said. “That’s the goal, and if we score more than that, that’s good, too.”
The Ravens have scored fewer than 28 points just once during the past eight games and have not scored fewer than 20 all season. The Steelers surpassed the 20-point mark just once over their first five games with Justin Fields as their starter, albeit they put up 32 in his final start (Oct. 13 at Las Vegas) before he was replaced by Wilson.
The Steelers are averaging 382.3 yards per game with Wilson.
The flip side of facing Baltimore and knowing you have to keep up is its defense has made that task easier. Over the Ravens’ past six games, they are allowing an average of 27.5 points per game.
“You want to score more than 30 points a game,” Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith said. “You get in a matchup like this. … They’ve had a great offensive year so far.
“Every game, our job is to outscore their team’s offense. A lot goes into games like this. It feels like a playoff game as much as it can feel in the regular season. So I’m excited to be a part of it.”
