ESPN is out here praying my football team misses the Super Bowl and honestly? I’m not even mad. I get it.
Per the Daily Mail, people inside that building are crossing their fingers the Pittsburgh Steelers don’t make it, because Aaron Rodgers got on their own airwaves and lit them up and now nobody there wants to spend two weeks in Santa Monica trying to book the guy. Fine. Fair. But fellas, you gotta relax, because if you’re actually laying awake over the Steelers playoff win drought ending in your Super Bowl, you haven’t watched us play a January game since 2017.
Nineteen years of never being bad is what did this to us
And I know that’s not what you want to hear, because that stat was the whole thing with Mike Tomlin. Nineteen seasons, never a losing record, and per Elias that’s the longest streak like that to start a career in NFL history. Every January somebody on TV would bring it up like it was a trophy.
It was never a trophy, man.
Because what do you get at 9-8? You get a pick in the high teens and a quarterback who starts eleven games and gets hurt. And then you go 10-7 and you pick right back in that same spot and you do it again, and again, and that’s been us since 2017. The Steelers haven’t had a losing season since 2003. We also haven’t won a playoff game since January 15th, 2017. And everybody talks about those two things like they’re separate problems. They’re the same problem. The first one caused the second one and it’s been causing it for nine years.
And here’s the thing, I think Tomlin knew it. Per ESPN’s reporting on his last day in that building, a team source in the room said he told them they deserved better and he couldn’t deliver it. That’s the most honest thing anybody in that organization has said in about a decade. And then he walked out, got a standing ovation, and took a job at NBC.
The Steelers playoff win drought is seven games and I can’t name you one that was close
Everybody quotes the number seven. Nobody ever quotes what those games actually looked like, and that’s the part that should have ESPN sleeping just fine.
Per Steelers Now, in the first six of those losses, the biggest hole we dug ourselves in each game went 27, 21, 28, 28, 21 and 21 points. Down three scores every single time. Not one heartbreaker in there, not one blown lead, not one game you can go back and rewatch and scream about a call. Six times, buried before you got up for a second plate.
And then this past January happened, which was somehow the worst one yet.
Wild card round, our building, Acrisure. The Steelers scored six points. SIX. We gained 175 total yards for the whole game, got outscored 23-0 in the fourth quarter, gave up a Rodgers fumble that Sheldon Rankins ran back 33 yards for a touchdown, and we handed the Houston Texans the first road playoff win in franchise history. Our own crowd booed them off the field, which, yeah. Earned.
Six points at home in a playoff game. That’s where nine years of this got us.
So they fired the coach and hired a guy making the same bet
Now everybody wanted that change and I understand why, I wanted it too. Mike McCarthy has a ring, practices start earlier, everything’s exact where Tomlin got loose. Great.
But he’s 62 years old, the last playoff game he won was with a completely different franchise, and the quarterback he’s building this whole thing around is 42 and has already told everybody this is his last season. And then they stocked the staff with guys Rodgers knows from Green Bay. Which, look, that’s a really nice thing to do for a quarterback in his final year. It’s a really strange thing to do for a team nine seasons into a drought.
That’s one more crack at 10-7 with a different guy holding the play sheet.
And listen, I want to be wrong here. I want Rodgers to get one more. I want McCarthy to get his whole redemption thing and I want nine years to go in the garbage on one Sunday afternoon in January. That could happen! FanDuel has us at +7000, so somebody out there thinks it could happen.
What actually ends it, and nobody around here wants to hear it
You draft a quarterback and you develop him. That’s the answer, that’s always been the answer. And the only way you get to draft one of those is to be bad, on purpose, for one full year, and this organization hasn’t been willing to be bad on purpose since Bill Cowher had a mustache and a job.
So until somebody upstairs is willing to eat one 4-13 season and take the heat for it, it’s another 10-7, another wild card weekend, another 27-point hole by the third quarter, and everybody in this city acting shocked about it in January like we’ve never seen it before.
