The Pittsburgh Steelers are opening with a two-game road trip against the Denver Broncos and the Atlanta Falcons. That probably doesn’t pique the interest of many people outside of the cities involved, but there will be plenty of storylines for the media to play up leading into both games. CBS Sports’ Will Brinson broke down the top 10 revenge games, and both the Broncos and Falcons against the Steelers made the list.
Starting with the Falcons in Week 1, Brinson had that revenge game listed at No. 9 on his list. Here is what Brinson wrote:
“The nuances of the revenge game also feature the need to examine fired head coaches, especially when they turn into offensive coordinators, and ESPECIALLY when they head back to their previous job to take on their old team in the first week of the next season.
“Bonus: He’s doing it with Russell Wilson under center (most likely) and that means we’ll (most likely) see Russ vs. Kirk Cousins, which is actually a rematch of the 2011 B1G Championship Game when Russ took down Cousins. Extra bonus: New Falcons coach Raheem Morris is a protege of Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, so there’s a little friendly juice there.”
Arthur Smith was the head coach of the Falcons for three seasons, and even Raheem Morris admitted after being hired that there might not have been a job opening if the team had better quarterback play. Smith got Matt Ryan on the tail end of his career in 2021, Marcus Mariota and rookie Desmond Ridder in 2022, and a combination of Ridder and Taylor Heinicke in 2023. Morris was more or less giving a tip of the cap to Smith and acknowledging that it may not have been all his fault that the Falcons went 7-10 for three straight seasons.
So what did the Falcons go out and do? They signed Kirk Cousins in free agency. As Brinson noted, Russell Wilson and Cousins have a history dating back to college, when Wilson and the Wisconsin Badgers defeated Cousins and the Michigan State Spartans 42-39 in the Big Ten championship game.
That makes multiple layers of sweet, sweet revenge to fold up into this Week 1 matchup.
As for the Broncos, that one is a little more obvious, as Wilson was just released two years after receiving a massive new contract. They rolled out the red carpet for him in Denver, and Sean Payton swiftly put it away over the course of the 2023 season. Brinson listed this as the No. 2 revenge game on the 2024 NFL schedule. Here is what he had to say about this matchup:
“Russell Wilson versus Sean Payton? Shoot it into my veins. Russ got cut by the Broncos this offseason and eventually signed with the Steelers on a dirt-cheap, one-year contract. He has all the spite in the world for being publicly embarrassed, even though the Broncos are still paying him roughly $85 million not to play for their team.
“The Broncos and Steelers are not rivals. But after this offseason, Wilson and Payton are — they spent the entire pre- and post-release stretches passive-aggressively firing public shots at one another. If you think Russ doesn’t want to light up the Broncos’ defense, you’re crazy. And if you think Payton doesn’t want to make Russ look terrible while simultaneously showcasing rookie Bo Nix, you’re just depressingly naive.”
Both Payton and Wilson will likely be downplaying this storyline to the media leading up to the game, but behind closed doors, or at the very least in their private thoughts, they both have every reason to want to stick it to the other party. The hostility more or less began right away when Payton took over as the head coach. He barred Wilson’s personal QB coach from the team facility and made it clear that it was his team, not Wilson’s.
Wilson has said numerous times that his five-year plan includes multiple more Super Bowl rings to his name. He clearly thinks highly of himself and still thinks he has what it takes, and that mindset is incompatible with being cut by a team that still has massive cap issues as a result. They really had to want to get rid of him to take that plunge.
He is also right on the cusp of being a Hall of Famer, and the saga in Denver did him no favors in that regard. He is looking to put an exclamation point on the end of a great career, and that will start with these two revenge games on the 2024 schedule.
