Mike McCarthy has praised Will Howard to the heavens, but even he knows the Steelers’ second-year quarterback is not perfect. At the annual league meeting, Pittsburgh’s head coach spoke of Howard as a viable starting candidate. Even still, reviewing his practice tape, he saw plenty to work on. Especially one aspect of his game, which he revealed at the same event.
“I think the biggest thing with Will [Howard], and it’s probably consistent with young quarterbacks, they’ve got to win from the pocket,” McCarthy declared, via the Steelers’ website. “At the end of the day. 9 or 10 games a year are gonna come down to the two-minute drill. That’s what the stats tell you. That’s the way we train. His ability to win from the pocket, then, is a key area of growth. Because I think he has everything else.”
It’s worth noting that in our own draft profile of Will Howard, a lot of his cons are related to footwork. Mike McCarthy suggested that Howard study Aaron Rodgers and see how he uses his feet to drive the ball. Alex Kozora noted his “questionable ability to truly drive and zip the ball” and his tendency to “drift back from [his] landing spot. We also described him as a “clunky” “stiff and linear athlete.”
Nobody was going to draft Will Howard as a 21st-century athletic quarterback, of course. And Mike McCarthy is certainly not talking about him putting together a 1,000-yard rushing season. But he sees an immense area — and need — for growth in how the young quarterback uses his lower body. Not just to navigate the pocket, but also to direct and drive the football.
“You can talk about his throwing motion. You can talk about some things throwing the ball. I think there’s a lot of growth with his feet,” McCarthy reiterated of Howard. “The challenge I see in college football is it’s so scheme-heavy, and they’re running these quarterbacks, and their schemes are diverse, so there’s not a lot of training in the footwork.”
Mike McCarthy believes in Tom Arth’s ability to work with Will Howard on this, since he is the only offensive coach that he retained from the Steelers’ previous staff. As a rookie sixth-round pick, of course, he didn’t get a ton of reps. A training camp injury also wiped out most of the most critical development period he would have had last year.
Even with the significant limitations of the evaluation up to this point, though, McCarthy is still fired up to sink his teeth into the Will Howard experiment. All the while, he is still regularly talking to Aaron Rodgers and hoping he signs, of course. Indeed, he may already know that Rodgers is going to sign. And if he does, that probably makes it even easier to talk up a player who doesn’t even have preseason experience.
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