The Pittsburgh Steelers are in OTAs right now, but training camp is still a ways away. That means it’s speculation time across the media landscape. While most of the speculation regarding the Steelers revolves around the quarterback position and the potential for wide receiver trades, there’s always time for speculating on win-total projections.
That’s exactly what Sports Info Solutions did this week with their win-total analysis. They created a model utilizing team, player, and even game-level metrics to analyze not just single games but the entire season. They then compared that against DraftKings’ current win total projections. For the Steelers, DraftKings projects 8.5 wins on the season. The SIS model is even less forgiving at 7.4 wins, 1.1 wins less.
So how did SIS get to that? At the game level, the SIS model looks at things like potential weather conditions (whether it’ll rain or snow and even whether it will be windy or not) and who the home team is.
When it comes to specific teams, SIS looked at how each team performed over their final seven games of the 2023 season (with greater weight to the most recent games). For the Steelers, that would include the three-game winning streak to end the regular season. However, that would be sandwiched by the three-game losing streak (including losses to the Arizona Cardinals and New England Patriots) and the Wild Card Round loss to the Buffalo Bills.
That performance is broken down into points for and points against (weighted for opponents) and penalty yards (also weighted for opponents).
Then when it comes to individual players, it all begins with SIS’ proprietary Total Points system. Suffice it to say, this is a way to break down each player’s contribution to a play’s Expected Points Added on both offense and defense. Then SIS took that information and distilled it to Total Points per snap before projecting that out based on how many snaps a player is expected to take in a given game. Then each player has 1,000 games simulated using that information.
Once those simulations are done, the information is put into another model to predict each team’s point total. That is used to create lines for each individual game, and then the model runs 1,000 seasons based on that information to create an average win total.
It’s a lot of math simply to say that the projections don’t look good for the Steelers. If either DraftKings or SIS is correct, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin will have his first losing season. That’s hard to fathom both in terms of history and the work the Steelers have done this offseason.
To be certain, the Steelers’ 2024 schedule looks nothing short of brutal. No question that’s playing into models not liking the Steelers this season. NFL.com’s Cynthia Frelund ran a model and has the Steelers missing the playoffs as well.
As a further note, the Steelers are the only AFC North team predicted by the SIS model to finish under the DraftKings’ projected win total. The Cincinnati Bengals are expected to win 10.9 games by the SIS model versus 10.5 by DraftKings, an increase of 0.4. The Baltimore Ravens are projected to increase their win total by 0.6, from 11.5 to 12.1.
The SIS model has the Cleveland Browns making the biggest jump in the AFC North at 1.3 games, going from 8.5 to 9.8.
