Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers’ scheme deserve some of the blame for all these drops

Pittsburgh is asking its receivers to make difficult catches with questionable service from the QB.

The Steelers receiving corps has largely served as the engine for what can best be described as a “death by a million shallow routes” offensive approach. But over the last month or so, those receivers have had some issues catching the football. They’ve dropped 17 passes since Week 9, according to Pro Football Focus.

Mike Tomlin addressed the issues in a recent press conference, saying “They can catch the ball or they can get replaced by those that will catch it. It’s just as simple as that. Like I’ve often said, I expect guys to make routine plays routinely.”

It’s easy to see why Tomlin is fed up with the drops. They are costing the Steelers a lot of points.

Tomlin clearly feels like this problem falls on the guys catching the ball, but that seems to be a bit simplistic. While watching Pittsburgh’s loss to the Washington Football Team last Monday, I noticed that a lot of the drops were coming on short passes over the middle. I wondered if that was the trend league-wide and if the Steelers’ volume of throws in that area of the field has contributed to their inflated drop numbers.

It wasn’t long before I got a reply from the all-powerful beings over at Next Gen Stats…

And there was a follow-up tweet a few days later, showing that drop rates do increase in the middle of the field and closer to the line of scrimmage, which is where the Steelers offense likes to attack defenses…

Those charts tell us where drops are happening league-wide and where Ben Roethlisberger is throwing the ball, but they don’t show us where the Steelers’ drops are occurring. So I decided to do it myself. I charted the location of every Pittsburgh drop this season and plotted them over the Next Gen heat map. I may have been onto something with my initial theory. As it turns out, Steelers receivers are having trouble hauling in passes in locations where all NFL receivers have trouble hauling in passes…

We can’t put all of the blame on the Steelers’ receivers. A lot of this can be attributed to how the offense has been designed and where Roethlisberger is throwing the ball.

It’s hard catching the ball over the middle! There are linebackers and safeties waiting to take your head off. The ball gets on you faster, making it harder to adjust to inaccurate passes. And there have been a lot of them this season in Pittsburgh …

Roethlisberger has to share some of the blame for this issue. His inability to push the ball downfield consistently — he’s completing just 35 percent of his passes thrown more than 15 yards downfield, per Sports Info Solutions — has raised the degree of difficulty for his receivers. And as defenses have adjusted over the course of the season, and started flooding those underneath areas with more defenders, the drops have increased.

Yes, Steelers receivers have had some ugly drops — Diontae Johnson and Eric Ebron, in particular — but the solution is more complicated than “They need to catch the ball better or else!”

That threat is pretty hollow, anyway. Will Tomlin really sit a player as talented as Johnson (easily the team’s best route runner) or Ebron (a matchup problem for defenses) because they drop a catchable pass every now and then? Would Steelers fans prefer the days of Ryan Switzer never getting open but catching everything thrown his way? Didn’t think so.

Given the current state of the offense and how reliant it is on long, painstaking drives, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. The offense has no margin for error and, in recent weeks, we’ve seen how one drop can kill a drive. But in order for it to be properly addressed, the coaching staff has to recognize that the play-calling and quarterback aren’t free of blame.