Player: QB Drew Allar
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: In his NFL debut, rookie QB Drew Allar looked comfortable and in command of the offense, and he made plays. While he has some things to clean up, the talent that tempted the Steelers to draft him showed through. Despite the positive showing, he likely remains in line for a redshirt year. But if nothing else, it adds fuel to the fire of optimism that he could be the future.
Drew Allar has less than half of a preseason game under his belt, but he’s about to get the conversation started. Now, the Steelers did draft him with an eye toward him being their future starting quarterback. His potential future is always going to be a part of the conversation surrounding him until he’s not. Either because he solidified himself as the future or proved that he wasn’t.
Right now, Allar is nowhere near either end of the spectrum. But he did enough last night to keep the buzz going and add more fuel to the fire. Overall, he played more crisp than I’m sure many anticipated, especially based on training camp reports or even live observations. To listen to beat writers preview what to expect, one would have assumed there would be a lot more “uh oh” moments.
Of course, Drew Allar got some help from Kaden Wetjen, taking a short pass 74 yards. That surely helped knock out some jitters and allow him to settle into a rhythm. But he continued to make plays after that, including a pair of touchdown passes.
Overall, Allar went 10-for-13 for 153 yards with 2 touchdowns to 0 interceptions. He also ran for a touchdown, averaging 11.8 yards per attempt and taking no sacks. Of course, if you remove his 74-yard play, he averaged 6.6 yards on his other 12 pass attempts. But two of those pass attempts were short touchdowns.
So if you whittle it down further, he averaged exactly seven yards per attempt on non-scoring plays outside of the long Wetjen catch-and-run play, going 7-for-10 for 70 yards on those efforts. But part of the point is to illustrate the fact that we’re still dealing with a very small sample size for Drew Allar. We don’t know anything about his future yet, but we know he can make some plays. One thing left to find out: how does he respond to adversity?
With the 2026 training camp here and many moves made, we have stock to take. Already promising a year of change, the Steelers have shaken things up. That is unavoidable, of course, when you gut the coaching staff. Mike Tomlin’s resignation has fundamentally changed this football team, including the players on the roster.
After a long season, the Steelers showed the ability to win the division and make the playoffs. But they also showed that their progress was minimal, since they made it no further. Two years in a row, with two different quarterbacks, they went 10-7 and lost in the Wild Card Round. The only differences are they ended the season on a higher note and won the AFC North. But it didn’t help.