What’s next for Drew Allar and the Steelers?

But let's talk some football, as that's what the people are here for.

The Steelers' first preseason game is in the books.

They're gearing up for the game two of the preseason against the New York Jets on Friday.

And I think there was a lot of excitement surrounding this first game, especially surrounding Drew Aller, who...

I thought played a very impressive, got his first true taste of NFL action and looked impressive given the circumstance, given what we saw out there.

I thought he was very decisive with a lot of his decisions.

I feel like obviously when you're scoring three touchdowns, there's a lot to look at.

And I think you really can see the foundation he's really built from this quarterback school that he's been working with under Mike McCarthy from the time he got here, starting with rookie minicamp.

Yeah, so there's important context to all of this, okay? And I know that the hype train is rolling and I'm not trying to slow it down in any sort of a way.

You know, I did a film study at The Athletic and a couple of things that really stuck out to me.

The Packers were playing preseason defense.

And what I mean by that is a lot of static looks where what Drew Aller saw before the snap is what he got after the snap.

No coverage disguises, no post-snap safety rotations.

And so a lot of it was just straight up single high man coverage or quarters coverage that stayed quarters coverage if it was too high.

Within that, the Steelers also aren't going to show the entire NFL their entire playbook.

And they also aren't going to give a rookie everything to digest and execute in this first game.

So a lot of what they did of the 10 completions, four of them were the Dragon concept, which is just a fancy name, West Coast term for slant flat.

And then two more were stick concepts.

So that's a long way of saying basically, There were a lot of vanilla looks from the Packers defense and a lot of reads where Drew Aller is basically picking a side and then even within that, choosing one defender that then he's kind of reading based on what they do and then he's picking between two options.

So he's still, I think, in this next game, you're going to want him to... eventually show greater diversity of offensive scheme, a greater ability to dissect coverages when he gets those different types of looks.

But given the circumstances, I think he basically played about as well as you could have possibly hoped for.

And I think between both him and Will Howard, I won't get to Will Howard momentarily, but I think they really both showed me a lot of composure because both of them looked the best we'd seen them look up to that point in training camp.

There have been moments of training camp with some highs and some lows, as we've been talking about.

And again, yes, it is very vanilla defense.

It is very... basic plays.