If there is such a thing as “purgatory” in sports, the Pittsburgh Steelers live there. After all, they can’t live in their fears, so they have to live somewhere else. In sports terms, purgatory is having a good enough team to make the playoffs but not win. That way, you only ever benefit from mediocre resources to improve, and thus stay where you are.
That has been the Steelers’ story for some time. Since advancing to the conference finals in 2016, they have made the playoffs five times without winning a postseason game. And when they haven’t made the playoffs, they have only done so just barely. Always a non-losing record and always selecting in the back half of the draft order.
“I’ve said for awhile I think the Steelers are in the worst spot in sports”, former OL Geoff Schwartz argued. “Good enough to make the postseason but not enough to ever win. So you just stay status quo every year because it ‘works’. Not bad enough to draft a stud QB, not good enough to win with a veteran castoff”.
Since 2018, the Steelers have finished anywhere between 8-8 and 12-4. The 12-4 season in 2020 was an outlier, and involved a late-season collapse not dissimilar to 2024. It was like a house of cards finally crashing down—at the worst possible time. Had it fallen earlier, they could have gained more help. Had it stayed up, they could have competed for a Super Bowl.
Of course, the Steelers’ results purgatory has also coincided with their quarterback purgatory. The 2017 season was really their last good year, the defense collapsing after Ryan Shazier’s injury. Since then, they have always had multiple glaring flaws.
The dam finally broke on the quarterback position with Ben Roethlisberger’s elbow in 2019. The Steelers scraped together an 8-8 record with Mason Rudolph and Devlin Hodges, then rode on Big Ben’s fumes for two more years.
After Roethlisberger retired in 2022, the Steelers took a swing on Kenny Pickett at quarterback. Though they drafted 20th overall, they had their pick of quarterbacks without trading up. That should tell you how bad that draft class was, of course.
The Steelers moved on from Pickett after two years, parlaying that into Russell Wilson and Justin Fields. That didn’t work either, after a while, and now they’re stuck in purgatory again. In a weak QB market, no obvious trade options, and an underwhelming draft class, what do they do?
Perhaps Schwartz is right. Maybe the Steelers aren’t just a franchise quarterback away from a Super Bowl, but they’re not far from it. The problem is, each year, they only get incrementally closer and further away, never truly making progress. Maybe it’s not purgatory. Maybe it’s just Sisyphus rolling us up the hill. Each January, we know where we’re headed once again.
