Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Pittsburgh Steelers are supposedly due to decline this season. It’s the third straight season that the team has made Bill Barnwell’s list of the five teams who are most likely to decline, and well, Barnwell is surely hoping he’s right at least one of these times, because he’s gone 0-3 thus far.
Pittsburgh was on the list besides two AFC North foes, as the Baltimore Ravens and Cleveland Browns were also picked as teams likely to decline by Barnwell, while the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles rounded out the list. As for Pittsburgh though, Barnwell writes that leaving Mike Tomlin out of it, there’s no reason the Steelers should be able to replicate the 10-win season they had in 2023.
“The résumé is the résumé. Leave the Mike Tomlin aura out of the picture and there’s no more obvious pick for a team whose win-loss record doesn’t hold up under any sort of scrutiny. The Steelers will find it extremely difficult to win 10 games again if they play the way they did in 2023. There’s just no track record for a team being able to do this year after year without eventually either improving their underlying performance dramatically or having their record fall back to Earth,” he writes.
One reason why Barnwell thinks Pittsburgh is set to decline is that he doesn’t view Justin Fields or Russell Wilson as a major upgrade in the quarterback room, and he also has doubts about if the defense can carry the load when Cameron Heyward is 35 years old and T.J. Watt is 30 years old. Yet, Watt and Heyward haven’t shown too many signs of slowing down, even though Heyward wasn’t quite the same in his return from injury last season, he still served as the team’s best run defender along the defensive line.
It’s fair to question if Pittsburgh will reach 10 wins again given their schedule, and Barnwell actually believes the most likely scenario to this team improving is through their offensive line with Zach Frazier and Troy Fautanu added through the draft, citing how much Arthur Smith will want to run the ball. But the offensive line through the preseason has been shaky in pass protection, although they’ve earned a passing grade in run blocking.
Still, right now, the line is the biggest reason why it looks like this team could struggle, although of course Fautanu is out with an injury so it may not be the same line that we see starting Week 1. Ultimately, Barnwell believes that if the Steelers are going to make the playoffs again, it will be by sustaining their level of play from previous years, like winning one-score games and stopping teams in the red zone, and not any drastic improvement. But he admits that he understands why Steelers fans might be skeptical of their inclusion on the list once again.
“If they’re going to do it again in 2024, it’s more likely going to be by sustaining their formula as opposed to drastically improving their underlying level of play. You can probably understand why I’m skeptical, but then again, I can also understand why Pittsburgh fans would be skeptical of what I’m presenting here, too.”
From a pure data-based perspective, looking at what the Steelers have done the last few seasons when it comes to winning close games, stopping teams inside the red zone (Barnwell points out that 11/50 times that teams reached the red zone against Pittsburgh last season, they failed to score), and outplaying their point differential makes it hard to see how they can be a playoff team again. But I think most people, myself included, see Wilson and Fields as upgrades in the quarterback room, and the Steelers just have a tendency to defy the odds under Tomlin.
Of course, the goal for this season is actual success in the playoffs, not just making the playoffs and making a quick exit as they’ve done recently. But they need to get their first, and that may involve defying the odds yet again or just simply playing better football, and honestly, both are equally possible.
