The regular season marks the culmination of an extensive investigation into who your team will be that year. By this point, you’ve gone through free agency, the draft, training camp, and the preseason. You feel good in your decisions insofar as you can create clarity without having played meaningful games. But there are still plenty of uncertainties that remain, whether at the start of the regular season or the end, and new ones continually develop over time.
That is what I will look to address in our Buy or Sell series. In each installment, I will introduce a topic statement and weigh some of the arguments for either buying it (meaning that you agree with it or expect it to be true) or selling it (meaning you disagree with it or expect it to be false).
The range of topics will be intentionally wide, from the general to the specific, from the immediate to that in the far future. And as we all tend to have an opinion on just about everything, I invite you to share your own each morning on the topic statement of the day.
Topic Statement: The Steelers are better equipped to combat the Kansas City Chiefs than they were in the first meeting.
Explanation: The Steelers were blown out by 26 points when they played the Chiefs just a few weeks ago. They were without Pat Freiermuth, Chris Wormley, Devin Bush, and others. T.J. Watt was injured in the game, as were multiple offensive linemen. Montravius Adams was just coming off the Reserve/COVID-19 List.
Buy:
Getting starters back that you didn’t have last time is obviously a plus in your favor, and Pat Freiermuth has the potential to make a real difference. They have allowed tight ends to do some damage against them this year. And given that every running back the Chiefs had that game seemed to have some success, getting one of their more stout run defenders back in Chris Wormley is a major plus, which will help put it all on Patrick Mahomes.
That’s where a (mostly) healthy T.J. Watt comes in, something he (mostly) wasn’t the last time. And he left the game early with bruised ribs on top of everything else. They saw how Mahomes will play them. They know what they have to do differently this time.
Sell:
The fact that running back Najee Harris is injured means they’re worse off. That means they don’t have a run game and will be one-dimensional on offense, which they can’t afford at all. It will make Ben Roethlisberger press and turn the ball over, as happened last time out.
Even worse, the Chiefs are getting more help in comparison to the last game than the Steelers are. They didn’t have tight end Travis Kelce. That alone outweighs anything the Steelers might be gaining that they didn’t have the last time these two teams faced. And it’s not like Andy Reid doesn’t realize what he put out on tape last time, so he’ll know he has to change things up.
