The Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl in 2008. They made it back in 2010 but lost. Since then, they have a total of three postseason victories and one trip to the conference finals—and not for a lack of opportunity. They have six first-round exits in the intervening years, though one technically was a second-round exit in the Divisional Round because they had a bye week.
There are many reasons for this, including just some bad luck. One of the fundamental concerns, however, is the simple fact that, on the whole, little ever changes. The Steelers stay the course, trying their best year to year, always confident in their plan, but rarely with the resources to make significant additions. Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gave his accounting of the phenomenon.
“They operate that way because they never want to bottom out and tank. They believe if [they] make the tournament they’ll have a chance”, he wrote in his latest chat session. “It hasn’t worked out for them recently, but that’s their mindset”.
From an outside point of view, I like the mindset. I don’t appreciate excuses being made for postseason losses by low seeds. Home-field advantage shouldn’t be insurmountable. The Steelers fared better on the road than at home in 2023 anyway.
And were it not for an unlikely punt-return touchdown, the Buffalo Bills probably would have been the seventh seed rather than the second (and of course Pittsburgh wouldn’t have played them; but the point is they weren’t some juggernaut that nobody rightfully imagined the Steelers should have been competitive against).
The Steelers’ two most recent postseason losses did come in the Wild Card Round as a seventh seed playing a second seed. But they lost to the Cleveland Browns as a third seed against a sixth seed. In 2017, they were the second seed losing to a third seed. They were a third seed in 2016 when they lost to the New England Patriots, granted, on the road against a top seed.
Of course, there is the matter of their struggling to contend at the top level consistently. How to go about fixing that, I couldn’t begin to put together myself. There are many questions to be answered this offseason, and the odds are not all the answers will be satisfactory.
“I would like to see them get younger too, but younger players make more mistakes”, Fittipaldo wrote of a team that had the oldest defense in 2023, but the third-youngest offense. “And that leads to more losses. Until they have a change in philosophy, I don’t think you’ll see their approach to team building change all that much”.
There have been tweaks, though. They parted with a valued commodity in-season in 2022 when they traded WR Chase Claypool. They moved up in the first round to draft T Broderick Jones. They made an in-season firing of offensive coordinator Matt Canada. If they viewed the Claypool trade as addition by subtraction, then all of those other moves were angled toward immediate competitiveness.
And that’s never changed, like when they traded for S Minkah Fitzpatrick just after losing QB Ben Roethlisberger in 2019. Their overriding philosophy seems to be you’ve got to be in it to win it. The only problem is they haven’t been winning when they get in it.
