The Pittsburgh Steelers don’t rebuild. They reload. To former NFL offensive linemen A.Q. Shipley, that’s precisely the problem. Weighing in on the team after another playoff loss, Shipley was critical of the organization for failing to make the hard decisions of taking steps backward to move forward.
“The biggest issue that Pittsburgh keeps doing is they just keep putting Band-Aids on things,” Shipley said on The Pat McAfee Show Wednesday. “They don’t do a full wholesale change. We’re gonna take one person out, but nothing gets actually fixed and it’s constant over and over again.
“There’s a quarterback issue there. We’re gonna get rid of Russell [Wilson], we’re gonna put Justin Fields back in.’ It’s the same guy you had the first five weeks of the season you didn’t feel comfortable with. So now we’re gonna go back. Now all of a sudden, he’s great. Now, we’re a playoff team, we’re gonna win playoff games. I just don’t see that happening.”
The Steelers certainly feel like a stuck franchise without a clear or immediate path to finding a high-level quarterback who can elevate the team over the long-term and compete with Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson in the AFC North. Since 2021, the team has started a different Week 1 quarterback each season, a streak that would continue if neither Justin Fields nor Russell Wilson return for 2025.
The Steelers have tried the veteran route with Mitch Trubisky and Russell Wilson. They have tried the first-round rookie route with Kenny Pickett. They have tried something in between with Justin Fields. All of the results have been the same.
But Shipley says the root of the problem goes beyond quarterback.
“You’re relying on George Pickens. It’s continuously the same problem over and over again. So how do we do that? We just put a Band-Aid on it. We just do that defensively. Same stuff. We got issues, we got glaring issues, but we get a new defensive coordinator, or we’ll fire a coach and we’ll bring a new coach in. Again, put a Band-Aid on it. We never actually fix the problem.”
Pittsburgh has been over reliant on Pickens in hoping for good health and maturity that’s yet to come. Without him, their passing game tanked and even with him, it had its share of problems. On the other side of the ball, the Steelers have built a defense around playing fast and free, but the unit fell apart at season’s end and bottomed out by allowing 299 rushing yards to an AFC North rival in a playoff game.
Shipley thinks for real change to come, a head coaching change must be on the table.
“[Mike Tomlin’s] a phenomenal football coach,” he said, “but sometimes over time the same guy in the same situation, in the same building becomes stale. Period.”
While Shipley isn’t alone in that opinion, it’s a scenario unlikely to play out. The Steelers made Tomlin one of the highest-paid coaches in sports before the 2024 season and are on the hook for all that money if they fired him. Doing that to turn around and pay another coach handsomely isn’t something Art Rooney II is willing to do. So Pittsburgh will have to search for other answers even if big fixes don’t seem on the horizon.
