The 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers entered the playoffs as a wild card team. They were the last team in the field in the AFC as the No. 6 seed and went on to win the Super Bowl. The 2024 Pittsburgh Steelers are entering the playoffs as a wild card team, and QB Russell Wilson got some advice from former Steelers RB Jerome Bettis on how that team handled their path to the playoffs to get some help for the current iteration of Steelers.
“I had a cool conversation this morning, earlier with Jerome Bettis, and talked to him about the 2005 football team. There were some bumps and bruises and some things that happened and some losses around the way, and I think they went in as a six seed, he was telling me, and it was cool talking to The Bus just about that because I wanted to get some perspective about how the team approached it,” Wilson said via the team’s YouTube channel.
“The reality was, this week is the only week that matters. And that team overcame a lot of obstacles and was able to respond the right way. I believe that’s who we’re gonna be, respond the right way, I have no doubt about the guys in our locker room and obviously coach Tomlin and who he is, and we got the right response, and we got to make that response a good one.”
The 2005 Steelers ended the regular season on a three-game winning streak and didn’t stop winning, while this year, the Steelers are going to enter the playoffs as losers of four in a row. The 2005 team did deal with adversity, with the team losing three straight games from Week 11-13 that dropped them from 7-2 to 7-5, but they won every game from there on out. QB Ben Roethlisberger was also banged up at various points throughout that season, as was Wilson this season.
Wilson said that it doesn’t really matter when the losses happened since both teams still dealt with a level of adversity following a losing streak. But it’s tough to really make it a true one-to-one comparison since the 2005 Steelers entered the postseason with some momentum, while this team doesn’t have any momentum with four straight losses that weren’t all that pretty.
The 2005 team figured something out after their three-game losing streak though, and the Steelers will look to do the same heading into the postseason. Mike Tomlin preached the importance of learning from what’s gone wrong over the last month instead of trying to wipe the slate clean, and the Steelers will have to really work to find the root cause of their problems on both sides of the ball.
It’s not going to be easy to win as a Wild Card team, especially if the Steelers have to head to Baltimore, but it is good leadership from Wilson to talk to a team legend and try to gain perspective about what it takes to win a Super Bowl in Pittsburgh. It’s never easy to win in the playoffs, and it’s especially hard with a team that enters the postseason struggling. But Russell Wilson is searching for ways to motivate the group, and it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility for the Steelers to band together and go on a run.
It might not be likely, but stranger things have happened, and the Steelers have a veteran group that will be eager to figure things out and surprise with some playoff success.
