The Pittsburgh Steelers are in the playoffs, but it certainly wasn’t pretty over the last month of the NFL season. The Steelers ended the 2024 regular season on a four-game losing streak. They’re the first team since the 1986 New York Jets to enter the playoffs with at least 10 wins and losing at least their last four games of the season.
And there is plenty of blame to go around for the four-game skid. The Steelers’ defense gave up at least 27 points in three of their last four games. But the Steelers’ offense might just take the brunt of the blame here. Pittsburgh failed to score more than 17 points in any of the past four games.
That’s the exact number of points they scored against Cincinnati on Saturday, coming against a Bengals team that gave up an average of 25.5 points per game. That’s 25th in the league. And the Bengals fired their defensive coordinator, Lou Anarumo, among others on Monday. The offensive failure on Saturday was the perfect cap on an unmitigated disaster for the Steelers.
“I was expecting so much more out of the offense,” said former Steelers DB Patrick Peterson on Monday’s episode of 1st and Pod. “Like I said, coming out of that three-game losing streak, thought that Arthur Smith and the offense would come out with a little bit more jazz, a little bit more energy. It just came out flat, man, and it showed throughout that game… They’re very familiar with the Baltimore Ravens. But if that offense is going to continue to play like they have been playing in the last month of the season, they might as well stay home because that’s where they’re going to be after the game.”
Peterson highlighted the two-minute drill to end the game as an example of just how bad the offense was Saturday. Steelers Depot’s own Alex Kozora broke it down in great detail, and it is exactly as bad as you remember. The Steelers and QB Russell Wilson looked like it was a four-minute drill and they had the lead. They failed to stop the clock on multiple occasions. Wilson, the veteran quarterback who you would expect to know what to do in that situation, made bad play after bad play.
And the Steelers, who only needed a field goal to win the game, fizzled out to end the regular season.
And for their troubles, the Steelers are now heading to Baltimore to take on the Ravens for a third time this season. On the plus side, the Steelers’ defense only gave up 19 points to the Bengals and QB Joe Burrow. That was essentially nine points below the Bengals’ season average of 27.8 points per game, sixth-best in the league. The defense will need to have another strong outing on Saturday against QB Lamar Jackson and the Ravens to give the Steelers any chance of getting out of the first round.
Otherwise, it will be another year of the Steelers being one-and-done in the playoffs. And we get to go through another offseason of wondering what the future holds.
