Sitting at 5-3 coming out of a Week Nine win over the Tennessee Titans on Thursday Night Football, the Pittsburgh Steelers find themselves right in the midst of the playoff picture in the AFC, which ironically features all four AFC North teams in the playoffs today were the season to end.
There’s still a lot of football to be played, and plenty will happen between now and the end of the regular season, but for now Pittsburgh is in contention and sitting in a playoff spot.
They haven’t played aesthetically pleasing football, but they are doing what matters most in the end: winning.
But how they are winning has some NFL analysts not buying into the Steelers moving forward.
That includes Fox Sports Radio analyst Jonas Knox, who hosts the “Two Pros and a Cup of Joe” show on Fox Sports Radio with former NFL QB Brady Quinn and former NFL LB LaVar Arrington.
On Monday, Knox stated that the Steelers’ winning ways is based on smoke and mirrors is going to get called out and exposed, causing them to crash back to reality.
“When it comes to the AFC North, look, I don’t even know if it’s mathematically possible that all four teams would get in. At some point, Pittsburgh’s gonna get called out and exposed. Like, at some point that’s gonna happen,” Knox said to Quinn and Arrington, both of whom pushed back some. “…As long as Mike Tomlin can keep his, .500 or better record throughout the course of his career, that’s all anybody cares about.
“…The Pittsburgh Steelers are the worst team in that division, and it’s not close.”
As the league sits here on Monday afternoon, all four AFC North teams are in the playoffs. That is certainly possible at the end of the season, too. There’s nothing that says all four teams in a division can’t make it in the new seven-team playoffs. Is it likely to happen? Probably not, but the Steelers find themselves right there in the playoff picture.
Though Knox pokes some fun at Tomlin’s non-losing seasons streak, it’s an important one. If it were easy to do, Tomlin wouldn’t be the only coach in NFL history to have done it this long into his career. Winning in the NFL is hard week after week, let alone year after year. It’s not ideally where the Steelers want to be, hovering around .500 every season, but they are a young team that is developing, and they’ve developed while still continuing to play winning football under the future Hall of Fame head coach.
As far as being the worst team in the division and it not being close, like Knox states, it’s odd that the take doesn’t seem to line up with anything that matters: like the division standings and head-to-head matchups.
The Steelers are second in the division and are 2-0 in AFC North play with wins over the Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens already this season. They were ugly games, no doubt, but the Steelers won them. They’ll get another shot at AFC North play in the coming weeks, traveling to Cleveland and Cincinnati in the final two weeks of November, which will be a downright difficult stretch of football for the Black and Gold.
