Just a month ago, it seemed like the Pittsburgh Steelers had answers to a lot of their offseason questions. Who will quarterback this team for the next few seasons? Can they end the playoff drought and finally get into the win column for the first time since the 2016 season? Are the Steelers a team on the rise?
Many of these questions felt close to being answered until a three-game losing streak forced a change of perspective. The trajectory of the team hasn’t felt this bleak since the shaky preseason.
FS1’s Danny Parkins thinks the Steelers could end up entering the offseason with all of the same questions they had a year ago, with little to no progress on some of the big, burning ones.
“If they lose to Cincinnati and it’s four straight losses to end the season, there will be a ton of pressure on them in Houston where people will expect them to win ’cause they have more wins than Houston,” Parkins said via Breakfast Ball this morning. “That’s another team that has not looked great, and that could be another bad playoff loss for Mike Tomlin. And then we’ll just go into the offseason with no playoff wins since 2016, no answer at quarterback. Mike Tomlin, he can raise your floor, but how high is the ceiling? And it’ll be all the same questions.”
The Steelers were quite busy last offseason in an effort to move past some of these problems. They brought in Russell Wilson and Justin Fields while trading Kenny Pickett to the Eagles. They hired their first external offensive coordinator since Todd Haley. They gave the biggest external free agent contract in team history.
Art Rooney II and other team leaders expressed a growing level of impatience with the lack of playoff success and they did everything they could to move past that. It would not be a comfortable position for anybody involved to have that hanging over them in the offseason once again. Mike Tomlin was just given a three-year extension. Another exit in the Wild Card Round would not be a good look.
Giving a decent-sized contract to a 36-year-old Russell Wilson to quarterback the team in 2025 and beyond is a tough decision. It would be hard to justify that if he failed to elevate them beyond what they were a year ago.
There’s no guarantee the Steelers will play the Houston Texans if they lose in Week 18, as Parkins suggested. They could still go on the road to face the Baltimore Ravens. Either way, an early exit would carry the same set of problems.
