The Steelers are at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, informally known as the South Side facility, now into the regular season. It’s where they otherwise train all year round, and the facility that Burt Lauten insists everybody refers to by its full name.
There are still unsettled questions that need answering, even deep into the regular season. They entered the process with questions in the starting lineup, in scheme, and elsewhere, but new problems always arise that need to be resolved.
Even questions about who’s starting and when may not have satisfactory answers in their finality, as midseason changes are certainly quite possible, for some positions more than others. We’re also feeling out how the new coordinator posts—or posts in new contexts—end up playing out.
There’s never any shortage of questions when it comes to football, and we’ll be discussing them here on a daily basis for the community to “talk amongst yourselves”, as Linda Richman might say on Coffee Talk.
Question: Are the Steelers the worst team in the NFL right now?
It’s been floated out there a lot over the course of the past however many hours since yesterday’s handling, ass-kicking, smacking, or whatever terms were used to describe what happened in Buffalo yesterday.
The Steelers got a bit of a pardon after taking advantage of a Super Bowl hangover Cincinnati Bengals team in Week 1 that is increasingly looking less like a Super Bowl team back in week one, but now after four straight losses, we have to ask.
Are they the worst team in the NFL, right now, regardless of what the future might offer? Is there anybody worse?
Ideally, I’d like this to be a thoughtful prompt rather than an emotional/reactionary one. After you see garbage, you don’t feel very charitable. But as Tom Brady recently pointed out, there’s a lot of bad football out there every week. It’s not just the Steelers.
But where are the Steelers situated within all of this mess? I’m not talking about where their current projected draft positioning. Who are the teams within their tier? Who are worse? If the Steelers played against every team 100 times in a row in a simulation, against how many would they have more wins than their opponent?
It’s not like there aren’t bad teams out there. I mean, look at the Carolina Panthers. The Houston Texans. The Washington Commanders. The Detroit Lions. And you know what, as I type this out, it just hits me all of a sudden—these are the current comparisons to the Steelers. Detroit? Washington? Really? The New York Giants are 4-1. The New England Patriots just won with a rookie quarterback drafted after Kenny Pickett. Marcus Mariota has two wins. Geno Smith…Geno Smith…
