Pittsburgh Steelers fans are feeling bleak about the current state of the team, and not without reason. They are currently riding a three-game losing streak during which they were dominated by their opponents. Even though they lost to some of the best teams in the league, they rarely even looked competitive.
Still, Mark Kaboly argues that they have a good chance of getting off the playoff schneid this season. He believes the Steelers can wind up with at least 12 wins this year, sitting at 10-6 now. But that’s as much because of their (likely) upcoming opponents as anything else.
“I’m still not ready to write [Mike Tomlin] off yet”, Kaboly said on 93.7 The Fan of the Steelers’ head coach. “This still could be a 12-win, playoff-win team very easily. They just can’t play teams like Baltimore, Detroit, Philly, and Kansas City”.
The Steelers play the Bengals in the regular season finale. They will most likely lose the AFC North, but if they beat the Bengals, they will play the Texans in the Wild Card Round. The Texans are not in a good place right now, either, so Kaboly believes they are a vulnerable opponent.
“There’s no guarantee that everybody from Cincinnati’s playing. If they’re eliminated [today], why would [Joe] Burrow play? Why would [Ja’Marr] Chase play, why would [Tee] Higgins play?”, he argued. “It doesn’t make sense. So all of a sudden [the Steelers are] playing a bad Bengals team, … then [they] go to a Houston team that’s in shambles right now”.
The Bengals play the Denver Broncos today, and a loss would eliminate them from the playoffs. They are sitting at 7-8 now, and a loss would give them a losing record. The other potential Wild Card teams—the Steelers, Ravens, Chargers, Broncos, Colts, and Dolphins—are all ahead of them in the pecking order.
Still, the Steelers are absolutely not where they should have been looking three weeks back. They were 10-3 and competing for the No. 1 seed. Now, they need help just to win their division. And Kaboly says the buck stops at Tomlin.
“If there’s somebody to blame for this, it has to be him because he’s partly if not mostly responsible for putting together this group and coaching it”, he said of Tomlin’s culpability in the Steelers’ slide. “So how can you not blame him for the successes and failures of this team right now?”.
Even with their glaring issues, though, he still believes the Steelers can win their next two games. And they can. After all, they already beat this Bengals team in Cincinnati, and the Texans just lost Tank Dell. Of course, they can also very much lose both of these games. And wouldn’t that make for an interesting offseason conversation?
