It’s rare for a former member of the Pittsburgh Steelers to advocate for the team losing. The standard in Pittsburgh is winning and winning Super Bowls, but the Steelers simply haven’t reached that threshold lately, with nine straight years without a playoff win. Former Steelers safety Ryan Clark said that the team’s lack of success lately means the Steelers should want to lose next season and give themselves a chance to pick a quarterback high in the 2026 NFL Draft.
“They should want to lose. I know this goes against everything that’s black and yellow, but they’ve been a competitive team the entire time Mike Tomlin’s been there. But since Ben Roethlisberger got to like the last two or three years of his career, they were not a championship contender. And they play just well enough to never get a high enough pick to go get the next Ben Roethlisberger. And you’re not gonna find that dude in free agency either. So whether it’s Mason Rudolph, whether it’s Aaron Rodgers, they should want to suck finally. They should want to get a top-10 pick in a quarterback draft that looks to be a lot better next year than the one there was this year,” Clark said on Get Up on ESPN.
The Steelers haven’t drafted high enough to take a game-changing quarterback and someone who could be a franchise option. While the team had its choice of every quarterback except for Cam Ward in the 2025 draft, it passed on the position until the sixth round, selecting Ohio State’s Will Howard. If the Steelers struggle next season and do wind up in the top 10, they’ll have their choice of options at quarterback, with potential ones including Texas’s Arch Manning, South Carolina’s LaNorris Sellers and LSU’s Garrett Nussmeier, as well as Penn State’s Drew Allar.
But the Steelers are never going to commit to tanking or not putting their best product on the field. It simply won’t happen, and even though the early playoff exits and failing to actually win a game in the postseason get tiresome from a fan standpoint, a season where the Steelers aren’t competitive wouldn’t be a lot of fun from that perspective, either. At least it would give the potential of hope for the future, but drafting is an inexact science, and if the Steelers did struggle and then made the wrong quarterback decision, they’d be setting the franchise back years.
Clark isn’t the first to suggest the Steelers should want to be worse. They’re basically in NFL purgatory right now – not good enough to win a Super Bowl and not bad enough to turn the tide of the franchise. But they’re never going to be an organization that stops fighting and doing what they can to try and claw their way to becoming a Super Bowl contender, and that means trying to win at all costs. Even if it may sacrifice their chances of finding a franchise quarterback in the draft, the Steelers aren’t going to even consider the idea that they should want to lose.
As it pertains to next year’s draft class, the Steelers also may have ammo to move up in the draft due to compensatory picks, although it’s unknown exactly what Pittsburgh will end up with. Still, even if the team does wind up drafting in the bottom half of the first round again, the idea that they can move up is at least more feasible next year than it has it been in the past.
It’s pretty shocking to hear Ryan Clark say out loud that he thinks the Steelers should lose. He might not be wrong with his thinking, but it’s just never going to happen. For better or worse, the Steelers are going to put the best product they possibly can on the field and continue their fight to win a playoff game and go on a run from there.
