By simming the season over 10,000 times, ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) projected the order for the first round in the 2025 NFL Draft, and well, if you’re a Steelers fan, you’re probably not too pleased with the result. The Steelers are projected to have the 13th overall pick in the draft, while the team has an 11.9% chance of having a top-five pick and a 30.9% chance of holding a top-10 pick.
Needless to say, FPI doesn’t think things will go all that well for the Steelers in 2024. The Las Vegas Raiders held the 13th pick in the 2024 NFL Draft following an 8-9 season, so if the Steelers have the 13th slot, odds are they wouldn’t finish with a winning record. The odds to have a top-10 pick were much higher than I expected, although they were lower for Pittsburgh at 30.9% than they were for the Indianapolis Colts, who held the No. 14 pick in this FPI projection. The Colts had a 33.2% chance to own a top-10 pick, which makes sense given that there’s likely more variance associated with how Anthony Richardson plays.
While it wouldn’t be a complete disaster scenario if the Steelers did finish 8-9, it does kind of put the team in football purgatory. If the Steelers are going 8-9, it’s likely that the quarterback situation didn’t work out, and you’d be in a position where you aren’t high enough in the draft to grab an elite talent.
With the final eight games of the Steelers schedule, things could get a little bit dicey, so it’s not completely surprising to see the Steelers end up where they are. ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky thinks the Steelers could lose out, and that hasn’t been an uncommon sentiment in sports media when examining Pittsburgh’s schedule. If the Steelers do lose out, that means they’ll end up winless in the AFC North, and if that’s the case, then there’s much bigger problems afoot. So I don’t necessarily buy the idea that this team is going to majorly falter down the stretch, but it’s not going to be easy with six divisional games, a road tilt in Philadelphia and a Christmas Day home game against the Chiefs.
But if the Steelers start off strong, which also won’t be easy but will have to happen for the Steelers to have success, and then can gut out that brutal stretch with 3-4 wins, the Steelers should find themselves in the playoffs, and not in the upper half of the draft.
