The Pittsburgh Steelers limped into the postseason and barely made it out alive. After ending the regular season on a four-game losing streak, they bombed out in the Wild Card Round. The Ravens jumped on them with a 21-0 halftime lead, and quelled any momentum with a responding touchdown to their own in the third quarter.
For the players in the locker room, it surely felt like more of the same. Some of the same issues that kept the Steelers from winning in the second half of December were still present. What was working in the early portions of the season, for various reasons, was no longer viable. Part of it was other teams figuring them out and being unable to fully adjust. Either way, it was a relief, Brooke Pryor sensed among the players, when it was all over.
“Three weeks ago, I walked into the same locker room when the Steelers lost in a blowout to the Ravens in Week 16. That locker room was silent—it was tense”, Pryor reported on ESPN yesterday. “It felt like a funeral. Last night, though, it felt more like a last day of school after everyone bombed a final exam. There was some sense of relief that it was over. I walked in and I saw players dapping each other up, kind of the sense that, ‘Hey, the season is done’”.
This is, of course, the ESPN reporter’s subjective analysis of what she experienced in the Steelers’ locker room. I don’t know that I personally sensed any relief from the interviews that are publicly available. Resignation, perhaps, maybe even acceptance of an inevitability. But I wasn’t in the locker room, so I can’t speak to that.
Pryor noted, something we did see, a repeated theme in the Steelers’ postgame comments. Over and over, players talked about not knowing what went wrong or how or why. They didn’t have answers about how to fix it, citing the coaches as being responsible for figuring that out. There was exasperation about how it all went so badly after working for as long as it did.
But in the end, it was just another playoff failure, another repeated theme in Pittsburgh. “Right now, the Steelers haven’t had that [success], and it’s another frustrating postseason loss”, Pryor said. “But one that it feels like they accepted the fate of, maybe all the way back in the first quarter”.
You might recall that the Steelers allowed a 95-yard touchdown drive on the Ravens’ first possession. While they made the Ravens punt the second time around, it was 21-0 by halftime on just four possessions.
To their credit, the Steelers fought back, forcing a punt to open the third quarter. They responded with a touchdown drive of their own, but the Ravens counterpunched with a backbreaking score. Another touchdown made it 28-14, but the fire slowly died thereafter. This 2024 Pittsburgh Steelers team is well and truly dead, but how many pieces will be back in 2025?
