Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not quite sure if you’re awake or asleep? Have you experienced lucid dreaming, where you have a degree of control over what your restful mind conjures? Well, this is basically the stupid version of that.
With the regular season rounding the bend and the Pittsburgh Steelers coming off a stellar preseason, it seems as though everybody and their grandmother is picking them to be their “sleeper team” of the season. But if everybody is high on the Steelers and believes they are being underrated and overlooked and slept on, are they really any of those things?
Or do so many analysts now just think the Steelers are good, while failing to realize that their colleagues agree? Because a term like a “sleeper team” is a relative one, after all. It is a team that you believe is going to perform better than is expected. But if everybody thinks one team is going to perform better than they think everybody else thinks, then everybody is wrong.
So perhaps we’ve reached the point at which Pittsburgh is no longer a sleeper team. They are just a team for whom the expectations have increasingly risen. Now, granted, it’s not like everybody is running to the mountaintops and shouting out that they’ve changed their Super Bowl predictions because QB Kenny Pickett led five touchdown drives in the preseason, but basically everybody thinks they’re going to be just fine this year.
Except perhaps for Peter King, who just thinks they will eke out a winning record and earn the seventh seed via a three-way tiebreaker, which, again, is a prediction so unnecessarily convoluted that it amazes me. Who predicts a three-way tiebreaker for the third wildcard spot? I guess the same guy who opts not to vote for certain players for the Hall of Fame whom he knows will get the required votes, even if that player is Troy Polamalu.
Yet everybody from Jeremy Fowler all the way back in June to Jason La Canfora just yesterday have referred to the Steelers as a sleeper team that nobody is talking about, and there have been plenty more in between, especially lately, whether used with another description that means the same thing or not. Even former NFL WR Dez Bryant called the Steelers his sleeper team.
So what does it mean to be a sleeper team if everybody agrees on who the sleepers are? Or are only those with the secret knowledge in agreement about which teams will be better than the commoners realize?
It feels very much like how draft analysts decide who is being under-drafted and over-drafted because the way teams have evaluated the prospects differs from how they evaluated them—even though history doesn’t show analysts to have any better of a track record.
Look, guys. We can’t all agree on who the sleeper team is. If we do, they’re not a sleeper team. The term loses its meaning. We’re all just wide awake now. Let’s get some breakfast. Peter King is buying.
