How important were Pittsburgh Steelers dropped passes in 2020?

The Pittsburgh Steelers had an absurd amount of dropped passes in 2020, but were those opportunities really critical to the success of the team? 

The Steelers have a group of young, promising wide receivers on their roster, and each one brings something different to the table. Diontae Johnson is a master at creating separation and running after the catch, While Chase Claypool and James Washington can win at the catch point down the field. In addition, JuJu Smith-Schuster is one of the league’s most reliable slot options and has a nose for the first-down marker.

However, something this group was severely lacking in 2020 was consistency catching the football. This is was utterly maddening for Steelers fans week in and week out last year. Each site that records drops has slightly different numbers, but according to advanced statistics from Pro Football Reference, the Pittsburgh Steelers led the NFL in drops by a wide margin.

PFR records the team as having a whopping 43 combined dropped passes last season. This is 7 more than the Cowboys and Lions who are tied for second in the league in this department.

This is not an offensive category the Steelers were hoping to lead in last year, and many fans wonder what this offense would have been like if Pittsburgh had significantly fewer dropped passes. You may be surprised if I tell you that things probably wouldn’t have been all that different.

Why dropped passes didn’t affect Steelers as much as you might think

Let’s start by looking at the number as a whole. There’s no denying that 43 is an absurd amount of drops to have in a single season. However, we can’t assume that this should have been 43 more opportunities to convert first downs, make big plays down the field, or score touchdown. No team has even gone a season without dropped passes.

Though this number is really high, the mean number of drops in the NFL last year between all 32 teams was 27. If the Steelers were average in this department, that would have been a difference of just 16 drops. How much better of a team would Pittsburgh have been if they could just get 16 plays back? It probably wouldn’t have made a whole lot of difference.

Recently, Matt Harmon, creator of Reception Perception, talked about how drastically underrated Diontae Johnson was in 2020. Though he led the NFL in dropped passes last year, Harmon claims that he more than made up for his errors with his fantastic success as a route runner last year. In fact, Johnson was so efficient running routes, that he ranked between the 86th and 96th percentiles vs. man coverage, zone coverage, and press coverage last season:

Johnson and Pittsburgh’s other young receivers were well above average in terms of their efficiency in a few major areas of the game. This by itself made up for some of the drop issues they experienced in 2020.

One other factor that fans must point to is the play of Ben Roethlisberger. Catching 16 more dropped passes (the number above the mean) wouldn’t have made Roethlisberger a much better quarterback than he was in 2020. His biggest struggles came late in the season while the majority of the drops happened early on, so we can’t blame Ben’s decline in play on this.

Additionally, some of the plays in which Steelers receivers were credited with drops came as a result of some pretty poor passes from Big Ben. While most drops Pittsburgh suffered last year were clearly on the receivers, oftentimes, the receivers would be forced to change the direction of their route or reach behind them for the football.

While we can’t go back and see what would have happened had the Steelers caught every ball thrown their direction last season, I can’t pretend like drops by themselves would have made all the difference for this team last year. Though they are as annoying as anything else in football, I really don’t think they moved the needle much one way or the other for Pittsburgh in 2020.