While the Pittsburgh Steelers season feels like it’s been worse, the team still sits at 2-2 through four games. While the two losses have been blowouts where they’ve been outscored 60-13, Pittsburgh is still in decent shape for the rest of the season record-wise. Pennstakes.com did a study looking at teams who have started 2-2 and how they fared, and found that 40% of teams that have started 2-2 have made the playoffs, with 32 of those 44 teams also winning at least one playoff game.
For the Steelers, that was the hope and the expectation for this season. Pittsburgh hasn’t won a playoff game since 2016, and with the amount of talent on the roster, it was a fair expectation for the 2023 Steelers. And despite things not looking pretty on the field, with struggles on the offensive line, at quarterback from Kenny Pickett and in the secondary, namely with Levi Wallace and Patrick Peterson, the Steelers can still turn their season around.
This is a team that knows they’ve disappointed, and this Sunday’s matchup against the Baltimore Ravens will be a good litmus to test to see if the Steelers can turn things around. For what it’s worth, and probably not much because they’re very different teams, the last two times the Steelers started a season 2-2 they made the playoffs. In 2015, they made it to the Divisional Round after defeating the Cincinnati Bengals in the Wild Card round, and in 2014 they lost to the Baltimore Ravens in the wild-card round.
There’s a path for Pittsburgh to make the playoffs, but beating Baltimore on Sunday is going to be important. If the Steelers lose, the Ravens will have a huge leg up on the rest of the AFC North with three divisional victories, all of which would come on the road. It would also knock the Steelers to 2-3 with a pretty solid Los Angeles Rams team up after their Week Six bye, and while Mike Tomlin is 12-4 post-bye weeks, things could still spiral.
The importance of Sunday’s game really can’t be understated, and if the Steelers fall flat once again, the team really should look into making significant changes, namely with offensive coordinator Matt Canada. The offense hasn’t been good throughout his tenure, and this season might be the worst yet. If the offense struggles again Sunday, it’s going to be clear they won’t have any tangible success with Canada calling plays.
Maybe this team can surprise us all and be like the 2018 Patriots or 2007 Giants, both teams that started 2-2 and then went on to win the Super Bowl. But it’s going to start with a strong performance on Sunday, and then we can get our hopes up about the postseason again instead of complaining about the porous offense.
