It used to be that, more often than not, the Pittsburgh Steelers were one of the hottest teams to close out the season. So it seemed, anyway, but that has been far from the case for a while now with rare exceptions.
Head coach Mike Tomlin did not offer a declaration of unleashing hell this time around, but he’s certainly put the Steelers’ fans through it since December began with back-to-back losses to teams that will not be sniffing the playoffs. Indeed, the New England Patriots have already been eliminated.
And here’s the real kicker: had they not dropped these two games that they had no right to lose, they would have a very clear path to not just reaching the postseason but securing the AFC’s No. 1 seed and a first-round bye. All they would have had to do was win out. That theoretical path opened with this week’s losses by the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins.
You see, the Steelers in this alternate reality would be 9-4 right now, tied for the second-best record in the conference with the Dolphins, who just lost to the Tennessee Titans. The only team with a better record would be the Baltimore Ravens at 10-3, over whom they could secure the head-to-head tiebreaker by beating them a second time in the season finale. A five-loss Chiefs team would own a conference record tiebreaker.
And in all likelihood, winning out should have easily secured the necessary tiebreakers to edge out Miami for the No. 1 seed. The non-divisional tiebreakers go as follows: head-to-head; conference record; record in common games; strength of victory.
It’s exceedingly rare that it would ever go beyond that, but this should be sufficient, so let’s see where we stand in a theoretical scenario in which the Steelers, Dolphins, and Ravens all end the season 13-4 (a joke, I know, but indulge me).
Step one is determining the divisional component, which is the easy part. With the Steelers beating the Ravens twice, they clearly own the head-to-head tiebreaker, and thus would subject Baltimore to a Wild Card spot and contest the No. 1 seed with the Dolphins.
In this scenario, there would be no head-to-head game, of course, and both teams would have a 9-3 conference record. They would have enough common games (a minimum of four) to qualify, but both would end with a 5-0 record (against the Patriots, Ravens, Raiders, and Titans, the Steelers beating the Ravens twice and the Dolphins beating the Patriots twice).
Here’s where the Dolphins crap out, however: they haven’t beaten a good team all year. Despite a 9-4 record, they have the third-worst strength of victory in the NFL. The combined winning percentage of the teams in the nine games they’ve won is .325. The Steelers’ strength of victory is .516.
Both teams still play the 10-3 Ravens. The Steelers play the 6-7 Seahawks, while the Dolphins play the 5-8 Jets. They also play the Cowboys and the Bills, but it’s not enough to catch up. Not to belabor the hypothetical of this alternate reality, because that’s not the point.
The point is this Steelers team has squandered yet another opportunity. They lost two of their most winnable games of the year despite the fact that they had spent all season finding all manner of means to achieve victory. No, they were never as good as their record indicated, and they were never going to go 13-4, in all likelihood. But they should still be in that mix given where they were a little over a week ago, and the way things are going, I’m not sure anyone is getting out of this without at least five losses. Even the Ravens.
