Mike Tomlin often says the Pittsburgh Steelers don’t live in their fears, but one former GM suggests their current state of purgatory can be boiled down to just that—fear.
“The thinking should be let’s build a championship competing team, a team that can consistently compete for championships,” Doug Whaley said Wednesday via 93.7 The Fan’s Morning Show. “Here’s the biggest issue, the Rooneys and Mike Tomlin fear taking a step back to take three steps forward. That’s it. It comes down to they don’t want to have a losing season.
“That moniker that they like to live up to is impeding them to be able to say, ‘Let’s start building for a championship.’ ”
I understand what Whaley is trying to get at, but I guarantee you that Omar Khan and Tomlin aren’t sitting around asking themselves what decisions they can make that would give them a chance to win a single playoff game. They are always trying to build the best possible roster to compete. It was only just at the beginning of December when the entire NFL world briefly believed that the Steelers could make serious noise in the playoffs.
They made the move from Russell Wilson to Justin Fields in the middle of the season specifically because Tomlin thought it could make a good team great. It didn’t work out, but it doesn’t work out for 31 teams every single year. I get that the Steelers have a standard and a tradition to uphold, but they’ve only managed to uphold that standard in six out of the 92 seasons that they’ve been a team and six of the 50 seasons since they first set that standard in 1974. Even that relatively small fraction is tied for the most Super Bowls in the league.
This whole conversation is much ado about nothing until the Steelers find a quarterback. Their moves haven’t worked, but they gave former first-round pick and Pro Bowler Mitch Trubisky a swing. They drafted a first-round quarterback in Kenny Pickett. When those moves didn’t work, they quickly cut bait and brought future Hall of Famer Russell Wilson and former first-round pick Justin Fields into the mix. They’ve tried a few different things to fix that issue. Things don’t always work out.
While Tomlin stated his belief that franchise quarterbacks aren’t exclusive to the top of the draft, the data shows that the vast majority of franchise quarterbacks are drafted within the top 15 picks. The years where guys slide to the end of the first round or the early second round are typically loaded QB classes, which the 2025 class is not expected to be.
From the words of Jim Rooney on the Ross Tucker Podcast this week, Steelers fans would “burn the city down” if they had to endure a three-win season necessary to secure a top pick. That would also undoubtedly take a toll on the culture of the organization. Things get rough in Pittsburgh when the Steelers lose three or four games in a row, so imagine losing 14.
If you could guarantee that taking a step back would result in three steps forward, it would make a lot more sense to go that route, but there are teams that draft high every year that never get better. The Steelers just aren’t the type of organization to embrace a full rebuild. To me, their best route remains trading up into the 10-15 range to land a quarterback in one of the next couple drafts.
