Who are the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2023? This is one of the biggest questions the broader sports media has been pondering throughout the offseason, but perhaps it’s not quite the right question. Maybe a better question is, who will the Steelers be toward the end of this season? That’s the question Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk asks.
“We know the defense is gonna be good, but if the team could be highly balanced with a great offense to go along with a great defense, and you throw in a great coaching staff, holy crap, you may have something here in Pittsburgh”, he said on 93.7 The Fan yesterday.
“When you get to the playoffs it’s gonna be ‘everything necessary to try to advance’. And by then the Steelers will be a far different team than they are now”, he added. “Really, you wouldn’t expect them in a single-elimination setting to be able to compete with a team like the Chiefs right now, but by the time we get to January, who knows?”.
It feels like a lot of Steelers fans are somewhat afraid to consider the full range of possibilities of how good the team can be this season. Most seem to be resigned to the fact that this will be a year of improvements that serves the purpose of giving us an indication of where they might be in the years to come.
But why not this year? Who knows how good they can be by the end of the season? Head coach Mike Tomlin has ridden many hot streaks to the finish line before, so he knows a thing or two about catching fire late and building momentum over the course of the year.
After all, this is the continuation of a Steelers team that went 7-2 after their bye week just last year. We already knew this was a team on the rise, and they should be markedly better this year, for not the least of which reason being the further maturation of 2022 first-round QB Kenny Pickett, who for Florio is the key to how far they can take things in 2023.
“By January, where will Kenny Pickett be in his development as a quarterback?”, he asked. “Where is his ceiling, ultimately, and how close can he get to it this year?”. It’s a fair question, and perhaps one of the reasons he said that “It would be nicer for the Steelers if they could stay off-radar a little bit”.
They are going to take some time to coalesce this season. That much is inevitable. The first-team offense may have scored five touchdowns on five possessions this preseason, but it is not going to be anywhere close to that fortunate.
The offensive line remains largely intact, minus the upgrade at left guard in Isaac Seumalo, but the Steelers still have rookie TE Darnell Washington to break in, and many second- and third-year players serving in huge capacities, from Pickett and WR George Pickens to Dan Moore Jr. and Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren.
Defensively, they have an entirely new top trio at inside linebacker, and two to three new starters in the secondary. There will be a lot of new faces on that side of the ball playing a lot of snaps. That’s why there’s good reason to be more interested in seeing what this team looks like in January than in September. Can they put it all together by then? If they can, why put a limit on what they can achieve?
