The Steelers are now in their offseason after failing to reach the playoffs in 2022, coming up just a game short of sneaking in as the seventh seed. They needed help in week 18 and only got some of it, so instead, they sat home and watched the playoffs with the rest of us.
On tap is figuring out how to be on the field in January and February instead of being a spectator. They started out 2-6, digging a hole that proved too deep to dig out of even if they managed to go 7-2 in the second half of the year.
Starting from the end of the regular season and leading all the way up to the beginning of the 2023 season, there are plenty of questions that need answering, starting with who will be the offensive coordinator. Which free agents will be kept? Who might be let go due to their salary? How might they tackle free agency with this new front office? We’ll try to frame the conversation in relevant ways as long as you stick with us throughout this offseason, as we have for many years.
Question: When will the Steelers make it back to the Super Bowl?
So, another Super Bowl is in the bag. The Steelers haven’t even seen one in a while. They’ve only been within a game of making it back once since 2010. And so the obvious question today is, when will they be back?
Presumably, every team will make it there whether again or for the first time, provided that enough time passes. And it’s not as though the Steelers haven’t had droughts. They made it in 1979 and then didn’t make it again until 1995. And then it was another decade before they returned in 2005. And their current last appearance was in 2010.
They’ll be in the Super Bowl again, at some point. They’re too good of a franchise to be kept down forever. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy thing to achieve, of course, and it takes a lot of planning, and not to mention luck.
The easiest way to answer this question is to start by figuring out whether or not you believe the current players and regime are capable of it. Most fundamentally, can Kenny Pickett be a championship-level quarterback? And does he have enough talent around him to put him over the edge?
Because if he’s not, then you have to think that we’re at least half a decade or more, at best, away from even being reasonably in consideration. And that would be a shame. As a fan, it’s important at least to have hope, and a reason to hope. Pickett is a reason to hope for many people. For now, there are too many unknowns for it to be any more than that.
