Things look rather bleak for the Pittsburgh Steelers entering Saturday night’s AFC Wild Card matchup with the Baltimore Ravens at 8 PM/ET.
For starters, the Steelers are mired in a four-game losing streak and are backing into the playoffs in ugly fashion. The offense hasn’t scored more than 17 points in a game since Dec. 8, marking a four-game stretch without doing so. That’s not even Matt Canada levels of offensive ineptitude.
The defense has seemingly cleaned up its tackling and communication issues in Week 18 but still hasn’t performed all that well against some of the league’s best, and it hasn’t shown it’s truly one of those elite units the Steelers believed they were for much of the season.
Special teams have fallen off some, too, even with kicker Chris Boswell remaining the best in the game.
The Steelers enter the playoffs with a 0.4% chance of winning the Super Bowl. In the AFC, that’s the lowest odds to win, according to The Athletic, behind even the Houston Texans (1.6%) and the Denver Broncos (0.9%).
But there’s still a chance.
For The Athletic’s Austin Mock, he laid out why the Steelers will win the Super Bowl, and why they won’t in a piece Thursday morning.
Regarding why the Steelers will win the Super Bowl, it comes down to QB Russell Wilson and WR George Pickens making magic happen again.
“QB Russell Wilson and WR George Pickens have brought an explosive element that the Steelers have been lacking for years. Pickens has been banged up over the past few weeks of the season, but he and Wilson started off their tenure together in impressive fashion,” Mock writes regarding why the Steelers will win the Super Bowl, according The Athletic. “Pickens’ first four games with Wilson yielded a yards per route of at least 2.0, while he only produced two such games in six starts with Justin Fields.
“If the dominant version of Pickens shows up for Pittsburgh this postseason, it wouldn’t be crazy to see them win a few games.”
If the Steelers’ offense is going to get back on track, Pickens and Wilson need to get on the same page and start producing splash plays once again. Pickens is coming off the worst game of his career, hauling in one pass for zero yards and recording three drops against the Bengals to close the regular season.
He did miss three games late in the season against the Cleveland Browns, Philadelphia Eagles and Baltimore Ravens, and it’s been tough for him to get back up to speed fully following his hamstring injury. In the process, that’s limited the Steelers’ offense, which hasn’t had that consistent downfield element to work with.
Wilson hasn’t played well, either, struggling to see the field clearly, making some mistakes with the football and taking some poor sacks. But if the two can rekindle what they had in their first few weeks together — Pickens went off for performances of 5/111/1, 4/71, 5/91/1 and 8/89 against the New York Jets, New York Giants, Washington Commanders and Baltimore Ravens — Pittsburgh could have a shot to win some games in the postseason.
Of course, that also hinges on the defense performing at a high level like it did earlier in the year, too.
“The Steelers played a much tougher second-half schedule, and the defense hasn’t held up — at least not to their typical standard. The unit ranks around average in just about every metric you can find, and that’s not going to be good enough considering the ceiling of their offense isn’t very high,” Mock writes. “They’ve dealt with some injuries, especially at edge rusher, but this team is built around the idea of having an elite defense, and they’ve proven these past couple of months that they don’t actually have one.”
Prior to the four-game losing streak, the Steelers’ defense was performing rather well, and was looking like a legitimate great defense, one that could take over games in the playoffs. Then the Eagles, Ravens and Chiefs did whatever they wanted to the Steelers’ defense in December.
Granted, injuries hit the Steelers hard defensively in that stretch, but the miscommunications leading to guys being wide open, the poor tackling and the inability to execute at a high level led to some in-fighting and frustration.
Though the Steelers seemed to figure things out in Week 18 against the Bengals, they still aren’t starting fast in games, and their turnover luck has seemingly dried up at this point in the season as they just aren’t getting the ball to bounce their way even when they do knock it out.
Going against a Ravens team that ran all over them in Week 16 is a tough task in the Wild Card round. Fortunately, there is plenty of familiarity there for the Steelers from a game-planning perspective, but execution is another discussion entirely.
If the Steelers can get Wilson and Pickens back on track, and a defense led by stars T.J. Watt, Cameron Heyward and Minkah Fitzpatrick, can create some splash plays and take the football away, the Steelers could win on Saturday night. After that, all bets are off.
But based on the way the Steelers are playing as of late, neither of those things seems all that likely.
