Every single preseason, some metric comes out that gives the Pittsburgh Steelers low odds to make the playoffs or finish with a winning record. And every single preseason, I wonder why I haven’t seen Mike Tomlin’s head superimposed onto Han Solo yelling “Never tell me the odds.” The Steelers have the 22nd-best odds to make the playoffs in ESPN’s Football Power Index (FPI) at just a 29% chance. In ranking all the 2023 playoff teams and their chance to return to the postseason in 2024, ESPN’s Bill Barnwell put the Steelers at No. 14 out of 14. His reasoning? “I foolishly choose not to believe in Mike Tomlin Magic.”
The Steelers went 10-7 last season, and 9-2 in one-score games. They’ve been ridiculously good in one-score games throughout Mike Tomlin’s tenure, but it’s the stat that everyone turns to when explaining why the Steelers’ success is unsustainable. And by success, I’m just defining it in this case to mean regular-season wins because playoff success has been hard to come by. Barnwell points to their 9-2 record in one-score games and the fact they were the ninth-oldest team last season to explain why they could be due for regression.
Barnwell admits that Tomlin and the Steelers have an incredible amount of success in one-score games, and that they defy the odds every year.
“There’s no reason anybody should think this would work if it weren’t for the fact that, well, it’s the Steelers and Tomlin, and they seem to defy the odds every year. I’ll cover this more in my column on teams likely to decline, but that isn’t really the case. From 2007 to 2019, Tomlin went 61-50-1 (.549) in games decided by seven points or fewer. Over the past four seasons, with limited or replacement-level quarterback play, he’s a combined 29-10-1 (.738) in those same contests,” he writes.
If anyone can sustain that record, Barnwell writes, it’s Tomlin.
“Can he keep doing this? Maybe. In a brutally difficult division, on the tougher side of the bracket, and with castoffs at quarterback? If anyone can, it’s Tomlin.”
Even with the quarterback room in Justin Fields and Russell Wilson being “castoffs,” both should still be an upgrade over what Pittsburgh has had the last few seasons. That alone should be enough to think that the Steelers could match their 10-win season from last year, but their schedule is more difficult on paper and there are no guarantees on anything in the NFL. The Steelers should’ve been due for regression the last number of years due their supposedly unsustainable record in close games, subpar quarterback play, injuries, etc., but they’ve always managed to stay competitive.
As Barnwell hinted in this column, he’s once again putting the Steelers in his “teams likely to decline” column, and it’s not the first time they’ve shown up there. And yet, they keep defying the odds, and with a better overall roster (not just at quarterback), they could do it again in 2024.
