Colin Cowherd’s summer of flip-flopping on the Steelers continues. After praising the team’s 2023 roster, he’s criticized the way the team built their roster. Now, he’s hammering them for their recent lack of playoff wins.
“We don’t really criticize the Steelers much,” Cowherd said on The Herd today, clearly forgetting the countless times he’s criticized the team’s defensive spending. “But we bang on the Packers and the Cowboys for not winning enough at the end of seasons. You know who’s worse than both? The Steelers. They don’t win big games anymore.”
Cowherd then goes on to criticize the quality of Pittsburgh’s playoff wins and the quarterbacks they’ve lost to, namely Tim Tebow, Blake Bortles and Baker Mayfield.
A lot of Cowherd’s criticism toward Pittsburgh has been unwarranted or just stupid. But he does have a point here. In recent years, the Steelers just haven’t done enough to win when it matters. While they made it to the 2016 AFC Championship Game, where they were blown out by the New England Patriots, the team has just three playoff wins in the last 12 seasons with their last coming in 2016.
That’s just not acceptable. A lot of the blame has fallen on Mike Tomlin’s shoulders, but the issue has been too many serious flaws that get exposed in the postseason. Against Jacksonville in 2017, it was the team’s secondary that got picked apart by Blake Bortles and a weakness at middle linebacker after an injury to Ryan Shazier. The secondary has been a major issue often in the last decade, and against Cleveland, it was the offensive line that struggled and a defense that had no answer for Baker Mayfield and Nick Chubb.
That’s to say nothing about the 2023 Steelers, as this is the most complete roster the team’s had in years. But the lack of recent success is troubling and it’s why I hate propping up Mike Tomlin’s non-losing seasons as an impressive stat. The Steelers aren’t the Texans (who have won four playoff games in the last 12 seasons) where mediocrity might be a little more accepted.
For a team with the history of the Steelers, deep playoff runs and Super Bowls are the standard. As Mike Tomlin is fond of saying, The Standard is the Standard. It’s why divisional round losses and wild card losses to inferior opponents on paper is so frustrating.
It’s the biggest thing that needs to change in Pittsburgh, and it needs to change soon. The Steelers have a team built to win now and they need to start making more noise in the postseason. With a quarterback on a rookie contract, now’s the time to do it. The Steelers need to show they can win in the postseason, and they have the team to do it now and in the coming years.
