Why you added him to the roster two years after being a No. 1 pick for the position. Why you were overly patient and extra careful with what should have been a minor injury, even as the clock was ticking at the start of the regular season. Why you never gave up on him, even though his young, talented backup was winning games while he watched. Why it was the right thing to put him in the lineup and give him a chance when so many questioned, criticized, or even mocked the decision. Why the risk was worth it.

It’s been three weeks since coach Mike Tomlin inserted Russell Wilson into the lineup to do the job he was brought to Pittsburgh to do all along, but it wasn’t until Sunday against Washington that the timing and rationale behind the decision came into sharp focus. focus.

After their bye week, the Steelers were 2-0, with Wilson and 6-2 overall heading into a showdown with the best opponent yet on the schedule, a schedule that, by the way, will only get tougher going forward. By winning those first two with Wilson at quarterback, the Steelers handled teams with losing records in front of a home crowd. They used some flashy special teams, a battering ram of a running game and some dynamic plays from their defense, and Wilson played quite well as well.

The Commanders had a much higher degree of difficulty for the very simple reason that they were more talented, better coached and had the confidence that comes from winning 7 of their previous 8 matches.

And as Sunday’s practice went on, the Commanders made some plays, took advantage when the Steelers presented some opportunities, and generally stood toe-to-toe and traded punches. The wind was difficult and required some adjustment. In other words, the Steelers were in a test of wills that would last the entire four quarters.

Whether the decision to punt on fourth-and-15 from their own 16-yard line with a 7-0 lead in the first quarter was hastily aggressive or a perfectly timed gamble that only turned into a disaster after a pass was dropped that accurate enough and long enough to get the first down is debatable. The defense can be judged by the five three-and-outs it conceded or by the touchdown drive that started at Washington’s 4-yard line and included three third-down conversions and a facemask penalty that wiped out a sack. And even though the offense got the ball into the end zone twice, it still had to punt five times in the first half and the only “chunk plays” were a 12-yard run and a 16-yard circus catch.

Assigning blame is an inevitable part of professional sports and everything that happened on Sunday will be blogged and podcasted and reviewed and judged, but none of that really mattered on the floor of Northwest Stadium. The opportunity each game presents to a team during a regular NFL season is precious, and the ability to manipulate the outcome in your favor is what pays the bills in this industry.

And those experienced in the ways of the NFL realize that the outcome of just a half-dozen plays can be the difference between seizing or squandering every one of those seventeen opportunities.

What is also true is that the player on any team most capable of influencing those six plays, good or bad, is the quarterback. He doesn’t have to be good all the time, but it certainly helps if he can be special a few times. Russell Wilson was special against the Commanders in some of those moments, and because of that, the Steelers left town with a 28-27 victory, raising their record to 7-2.

Wilson was special on a day when things didn’t necessarily go according to plan for him. He would end the game having completed 50 percent of his passes for less than 200 yards, being sacked three times and intercepted once.

The receiver had first donned the uniform four days earlier when he came over in a trade from the Jets, and was only present in the game against Washington as an injury replacement. He had never played the piece in practice and didn’t know what to do with it. But it was third-and-9 from the Washington 32-yard line, there was 2:27 left, and they were losing by 6. It had to be now. Mike Williams said Wilson told him where to line up and what route to run, and then it became a matter of turning his head for the perfectly timed/thrown ball and catching it. Touchdown. Big pro quarterback there.

When the defense turned the ball over on downs near midfield with their own big play, the difference between winning or losing came down to protecting a one-point lead. The Commanders dug in, and before you know it, it’s fourth-and-1 with 1:02 to play. Get the first one down and it’s game over. Anything else would bring back Jayden Daniels and the Washington offense for another crack at a last-second field goal and a dramatic victory for the home team.

Wilson converted for the Steelers by using cadence as a weapon to create neutral zone offense. Five meters. First down. Victory formation.

“It’s a good team win,” Tomlin said. “When you get into an environment like this and find a way to make it happen, it’s not only a well-deserved victory, but there’s real growth that comes with it. Knowing yourself, individually and collectively, is part of this as we go through this journey. We learned a little bit about ourselves today, hopefully in a positive way.”

One of the things they learned was that against a good team on the road, they had a quarterback capable of performing in the big clutch situations that all winning teams in the NFL must have, which the Steelers haven’t had since Ben Roethlisberger plied his trade, which is something they definitely need for the remainder of 2024.

They’ll absolutely have to have it, because the only thing a 7-2 in mid-November gets is every remaining team’s attention on the schedule, and as we’ve already established, that schedule is only going to get harder from here. Somehow they knew it would be necessary to face the course of that schedule, and how they would fare along the way would determine them.

The next visit is from the Baltimore Ravens, and if history goes, this could seem like a pillow fight. Games like this one against Washington and one against the Ravens a week later – and the situations within games like this that will ultimately determine the outcome – are why Russell Wilson is here. And that’s why you did all those other things leading up to this in the first place.

That’s how important playing quarterback is in a big way.