The Steelers are now back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, facing down a long regular season that looks a lot more promising given how things have gone leading up to it. Finishing just above .500 last year, they anticipate being able to compete with any team in the league this season with second-year QB Kenny Pickett leading the way.
They’ve done a great deal to address what they identified as their shortcomings during the offseason, which included addressing the offensive and defensive lines as well as the secondary and the inside linebacker room, which is nearly entirely different from last year. The results have been positive so far.
Even well into the regular season and beyond, there are going to be plenty of questions that need answered. When will the core rookies get to play, or even start? Is the depth sufficient where they upgraded? Can they stand toe-to-toe with the Bengals and the other top teams in the league? We’ll try to frame the conversation in relevant ways as long as you stick with us throughout the season, as we have for many years.
Question: Are the Steelers currently the worst team in the AFC North?
Don’t look now, but suddenly everybody in the AFC North is back over .500 again. It is, in fact, the only division in football in which there isn’t at least one team that is three games below .500. But if any one team in the division were to be picked as most likely to finish below that mark, I suspect that the Pittsburgh Steelers may well be the most common answer.
The Baltimore Ravens, now 10-3, hold the AFC’s top seed for now pending the Miami Dolphins’ Monday night game against the Tennessee Titans. The Cleveland Browns are now 8-5, while the Steelers, who lost on Thursday, and the Cincinnati Bengals, who have won two in a row, are 7-6.
Pittsburgh is trending in the wrong direction, however, losing two in a row to some of the worst teams in the league. Meanwhile, the Bengals are winning with a backup quarterback who had no NFL experience a short time ago.
Now I ask you this: irrespective of each team’s remaining schedule, are the Steelers, as currently constituted or as projected by the end of the year, the worst team in the AFC North? They have played most of the past two games, for example, without QB Kenny Pickett, but how much better are they with Mitch Trubisky? Or perhaps, how much less bad?
The Bengals and Browns manage to put up 30-plus points with backup quarterbacks. The Steelers, meanwhile, haven’t scored 30-plus points (in a win) since Week 10 of the 2020 season. And they’ve only scored 30-plus points even in a loss twice since then in the regular season.
The thing is, not much is different between now and when they won four out of five games just a short time ago. Other than Pickett’s availability, of course, the biggest thing that’s changed would seem to be their luck. Are they just in a bad stretch, or have they been exposed as frauds?
