We’ve found ourselves writing things like “it wasn’t always pretty, but” a lot over the past few years. The Pittsburgh Steelers have had a real tendency to win ugly. Even though they only put up 16 points yesterday over the Cincinnati Bengals, however, for a change much of it actually was quite pretty football.
It would be hard not to play with some level of football efficiency when you’re churning out 400-plus yards of offense, after all. You’re just not going to move the ball that much without some quality plays mixed in. But at the end of the day, it all goes down the same.
“We did what we needed to do to win”, head coach Mike Tomlin said after the game, via the team’s website. “Guys like me and [QB] Kenny [Pickett], we’re judged based on winning and losing, and we don’t run from that, we run to that. He and I are winners today”.
Using that measuring stick, the two of them have been winners seven out of 11 times they’ve taken the field this year, since that is their record. They found the ways to win seven times, all of them, as it would turn out, within a one-score margin. In some cases, such as yesterday’s game, it was a late score that prevented them from finishing comfortably with some cushion.
Tomlin’s response came from a question about Pickett’s performance on the day and what he liked out of it. Rather than talk about improvements in accuracy and efficiency, reading the field better, continuing to avoid turnovers, he boiled it down to the essential task at hand: outscoring the opponent.
And that’s precisely what he’s done more often than not, yet not to the degree of comfort that would save jobs. After all, Tomlin fired offensive coordinator Matt Canada just last week—or somebody did, anyway. The organization did.
Technically, it did come after a loss, but the Steelers were 4-1 in their previous five games, so it’s not as though they made some drastic move to try to salvage the season. They were still finding ways to win even when it looked uglier than it might have yesterday.
The thing about Tomlin’s position is, however, that only the greatest winners are ever truly judged based on winning and losing. If you win championships, very few will care how you did it. If you don’t, and you win the way the Steelers have under Pickett, it will matter. You have to make it over the hump.
Because the way you win can be indicative of the likelihood of continuing to do so. Win improbably with regularity and it’s likely that you’re getting lucky, and your luck will run out. And the only time luck has value in this arena is if you luck into a championship. Win a championship any way you want. That’s fine. But you’d better win it.
