Sitting at 6-3, the Pittsburgh Steelers find themselves right in the midst of the AFC playoff picture in a loaded AFC North.
Yet, despite being 6-3 on the season, there are a number of questions surrounding the Steelers centering on if they’re even good and if the lack of overall offensive output week to week the Steelers have shown is sustainable.
The Steelers are winning ugly, and for some talking heads, that’s not good enough. One of those guys is the host of Get Up on ESPN, Mike Greenberg.
Greenberg fired away at the Steelers Monday morning, calling them a bad football team but giving head coach Mike Tomlin major props for winning games with a team that “stinks.”
“Let’s just rename the coach of the year award the Mike Tomlin Award and give that to someone else every year. You can’t coach a team better than this guy is coaching this team because they stink and they’re six and three,” Greenberg said opening up the segment regarding Steelers-Packers, according to the NFL on ESPN YouTube page. “…Their offense is unwatchable.
“I can’t watch them play offense. I can’t watch the first three quarters.”
That very much may be true as the Steelers have one of the worst offenses in football from a statistical standpoint. Yet the Steelers keep things close with a bend-don’t-break defense and make enough plays late to finish off games and pick up wins.
To the credit of former New England Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi, he pushed back on the unwatchable comments from Greenberg. Bruschi dropped quite the line in response.
“Can you watch them win?” Bruschi asked Greenberg, according to video via the NFL on ESPN YouTube Page. “…We did we just do? We were talking about the other teams, the Ravens, who can’t finish in the fourth quarter and you’re saying they should be 10-0. So now, now we got the Steelers that are doing it when it matters most. And you’re saying they stink?”
That is quite the response from Bruschi. and quite honestly, the correct one in this entire conversation regarding the Steelers.
Even though the Steelers might be hard to watch at times, especially on offense, they are doing the only thing that matters: winning football games.
You are what your record says you are at this point, and for the Steelers, that record says they are 6-3 and one of the better teams in the AFC. If the Steelers could just have some semblance of an average NFL passing attack to pair with a run game that looks like it’s about ready to take off in the second half of the season, they could be even more dangerous.
But right now, they’re finding ways to win, and they’re closing out games. It’s not about how you start, it’s how you finish.
“We’re trying to figure out how they keep doing it. And how they keep doing is they make plays. When the game’s on the line in the fourth quarter, they’re finding a way to even run the football more. I am buying the Pittsburgh Steelers as a good football team,” Bruschi said on Get Up. “This is a solid football team, but when it comes down to it, you’re going to have to put that performance together to be with some of the best teams, especially in the [AFC] North.
“But that coach right there, he’ll have ’em ready.”
Tomlin will have the Steelers ready, and the arrow is pointing up right now with them. They are progressing offensively, though that progression is not linear. Sunday might have been a step backwards in the passing game, but the Steelers dominated the line of scrimmage and made plays when it mattered most on both sides of the football.
That’s a winning formula for the Steelers right now. Not many teams can say that.
