Truth be told, the sudden love from the punditry for the Pittsburgh Steelers over the course of the last couple of weeks has gotten a bit much. These are the sorts of things I wouldn’t even pay attention to in the first place if it weren’t my job to do so. But one can argue that it’s about time they started realizing they were underestimating this team.
Now, I’m not about to put a bet down for them to win the Super Bowl this year, to be clear. But I always knew this was a team that was going to outperform expectations. So does Andrew Perloff, who recently compared this current Steelers team to the ones he saw head coach Mike Tomlin leading at the very beginning of his career here.
“I think they’re reinventing the early Ben [Roethlisberger] days”, he said on the Maggie and Perloff show on CBS Sports Radio. “They got caught up with some bad dudes. There’s no doubt about it. I think the Le’Veon Bell and Antonio Brown can easily be forgotten”, he went on, adding that “all the [playoff] wins came when they had all those veterans on defense”.
He also said that this is looking like a “10-years-ago Steelers team”, though surely he meant to go back more than 10 years—more like 12-15. That was when the defense was dominant and steering the ship, and the offense mostly just did its job when needed and was largely quiet otherwise.
“They got old and then you’re stuck with all of these high-octane, bad-character players, and they lost”, he said as the team shifted from a defensive emphasis to the offensive Killer Bs era, which came with minimal postseason success. “They lost and lost and lost. I think they’re recreating really the early Mike Tomlin teams because their defense could be great and Kenny Pickett kind of reminds me of a young Ben”.
Bell, Brown, and “Big Ben” Roethlisberger were the Killer Bs, and when the trio was at its height, the Steelers had one of the better offenses in the NFL. Only they had little to show for it. They did make it to the postseason four years in a row, but went 3-4 in that time with two one-and-dones, including in 2017 with a first-round bye following a 13-3 regular season.
Pittsburgh reached the Super Bowl twice in Tomlin’s first four seasons, winning once, and they did so by having the best defensive unit in football with an offense orchestrated by a (still relatively) young quarterback who simply knew how to win when it was needed.
Pickett had four game-winning drives in the second half of last season, finding ways to do what was needed of him when it was needed. The defense was able to keep the scores low during that run, only surrendering more than 17 points once over the final nine games. I can understand the impulse to draw comparisons between the two eras.
But it’s an awful lot to live up to, and it’s also easier said than done given the rule changes since then.
