The 2016 season is unfortunately over, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are now embarking upon their latest offseason journey, heading back to the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, formerly known and still referred to as the ‘South Side’ facility of Heinz Field. While the postseason is now behind us, there is plenty left to discuss.
And there are plenty of questions left unanswered as well. The offseason is just really the beginning phase of the answer-seeking process, which is lasts all the way through the Super Bowl for teams fortunate enough to reach that far.
You can rest assured that we have the questions, and we will be monitoring the developments in the offseason as they develop, and beyond, looking for the answers as we look to evaluate the makeup of the Steelers as they try to navigate their way back to the Super Bowl, after reaching the AFC Championship game last season for the first time in more than half a decade.
Question: What was the worst loss that you can remember for a Steelers game that you watched?
Yesterday I asked you if a loss in the Super Bowl was necessarily harder to take than any other loss. The results to that question were pretty mixed, as I expected. Many did focus on the style of the loss, and the way the Falcons lost on Sunday was particularly dismal, giving up by far the biggest lead in Super Bowl history and losing the first overtime game to boot.
So that brings me to my next question for today: what was the worst loss that you can remember witnessing as a Steelers fan? As with any team that has played for long enough, there are certainly plenty of worth candidates to choose from, and there are a lot of factors to consider, such as how much you want to weight the importance of the game.
I would say for me that the worst loss would have to be the first game that I ever distinctly remember watching as an active observer, which was the 1995 Super Bowl between the Steelers and the Cowboys. I hardly knew anything about football at the time (I was nine at the time), but I still distinctly remember the feeling of watching the Steelers looking like they had a chance of coming back only to see the ball intercepted time after time to end all hope.
That was the first time that the Steelers had ever reached the Super Bowl and lost, so I might imagine that there are many fans who would remember that game similarly. It was especially impactful for longtime fans who remembered their 1970s dynasty and how it had been a decade and a half since they had much success.
Of course, this question is heavily subjective, and it doesn’t have to be a particularly important game in the grand scheme of things. The Steelers have lost some bad ones in Philadelphia. There was that Hell unleashed in Cleveland in 2009. James Harrison botching a snap for a safety against the Giants in 2008…this might not want to be a memory lane I want to stroll down after all.
