It certainly feels like the NFL schedule makers did not do the Pittsburgh Steelers any favors this year. Every single divisional game from Week 11 on. Short weeks involving the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs. It all comes together in a demanding schedule.
The Steelers need to play quality football from the first whistle of Week 1 until the clock hits 0:00 in the final regular-season game. Otherwise, the playoffs will be out of reach and head coach Mike Tomlin’s streak of non-losing seasons could come to an end. However, Chris Brockman of The Rich Eisen Show doesn’t think the Steelers can avoid that.
On Monday’s episode of Overreaction Monday, Brockman predicts that the Steelers will have a losing record because of their final stretch of games.
“Bad news, this will be the first year that… Mike Tomlin finishes with a sub-.500 record…” Brockman said. “Unless they’re 9-0 going into Week 11, how do they finish with a winning record this year?”
Suzy Shuster, filling in for Rich Eisen, agreed.
‘Not at all an overreaction,’ Shuster said.
Now there’s no denying that the Steelers’ late-season stretch is brutal. They have multiple short weeks, playing the Cleveland Browns on Thursday night in Week 12, the Ravens on Saturday in Week 16, and then the Chiefs on the following Wednesday for Christmas. It’s going to be an incredibly tough stretch of games.
So on an overreaction show, it’s easy to say that the Steelers better be undefeated before kicking off that stretch in order to have a winning season. However, it’s hard to imagine that the Steelers are going to lose every single game in that stretch. The point that the schedule is tough still stands, though. And Brockman is far from the only one who thinks it will trip up Tomlin and the Steelers. Colin Cowherd has already predicted Tomlin will be taking a network TV job next year.
The kicker is that the beginning of the year, while not quite as bad, is still not friendly thanks to a slew of road games. Not only will that stretch be imperative to the Steelers’ hope for postseason play, it’s also important for whoever the starting quarterback is. Brockman thinks it will be Russell Wilson, and that he’ll need to play well early.
“Russ better start out hot…” Brockman said. “They have three of the first four on the road. They better start out hot or it’s going to be [Justin] Fields time.”
However, if the schedule always went to plan, why would we even play the games? Unfortunately, injuries are a part of the NFL. It can cost teams badly, especially late in the season. We have no idea what any of these teams will look like late in 2024. All we are talking about is how the schedule looks like on paper.
But when it’s May, we only have the paper to look at.
