The Steelers are at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, informally known as the South Side facility, nearing the end of 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 year. They entered the process with questions in the starting lineup, in the 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: Would you want the Steelers to make it to the postseason as an eighth seed?
The NFL has already dismissed out of hand and idea that surfaced yesterday about the potential to add an eighth seed in order to eliminate the top seed from having a bye week, due to the unavoidable complications of canceling the game between the Bengals and the Bills. That means this discussion is purely hypothetical.
But I think it’s one that we can still have some fun having, and which may also speak to our fandom ‘philosophy’. The Steelers still have a tough road ahead to get into the postseason as the seventh seed, needing to beat the Browns while also having the Patriots lose to the Bills and the Dolphins to lose to or tie with the Jets.
All three of those scenarios individually are reasonably likely to happen. All three of them happening collectively is a taller order. If there were an eighth seed, it would immeasurably improve Pittsburgh’s odds of making it. At a bare minimum, they would need only one outside result to fall in their favor.
There still isn’t a scenario, I believe, in which they can lose the game and still advance as a hypothetical eighth seed. But they could advance in the event of a tie, and it’s not as though they haven’t had some history of tying the Browns.
So the question is this: how would you feel about a hypothetical scenario for the 2022 season in which the Steelers were the beneficiaries of a temporary eighth seed, without which they otherwise would not have advanced to the postseason? Would you just consider it a waste of time and draft real estate, or would you prefer to see your team play another week?
