The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 2019 season were one of divisions of talent. Generally, the defense was very talented and overall pretty healthy. The offense was either injured or not very talented, or at least inexperienced. These divisions were best illustrated in their both having made some sort of history.
The defense led the NFL in both sacks and takeaways in 2019, with 53 and 38, respectively. Since 1982, when the sack became an official statistic, they are the first team to ever accomplish that. The 1974 Steelers are also acknowledged to have done it.
Meanwhile, the offense did something that no Steelers team had done for an even longer period of time. In going the entire season without ever scoring more than 27 points, they were the first Pittsburgh squad to fail to post a single 30-point game over an entire year since 1971. And of course, they only played 14 games back then.
The Steelers scored just 18.1 points per game this season, and that included three non-offensive touchdowns from Devin Bush, Minkah Fitzpatrick, and Diontae Johnson. Their 289 total points scored was the fewest in franchise history since 1998, when they managed just 263, a woeful 16.4 points per game. Coincidentally, the defensed had allowed the exact number of points that season: 303, or 18.9 per game. That ranked seventh in 1998, and fifth this past season.
Over the final three weeks, Pittsburgh only scored a total of 30 points, exactly 10 in each game. They entered the finale as one of two teams to fail to score at least 30 points in any one game on the year, the other being the Jacksonville Jaguars.
But Jacksonville put up 38 points in an 18-point win over the Indianapolis Colts in the season finale (and they did score 29 points in one other game). That broke a 27-game streak for the Jaguars that went all the way back to Week Four of the 2018 season, when they put up 31 points in a win over the New York Jets.
Pittsburgh’s dry spell at least isn’t that long—yet. With the 16 games this year, it’s currently at 20 games, last hitting 30 points on the nose in Week 13 against the Los Angeles Chargers. Right now, though, who knows what the offense is going to look like in 2020?
