No matter what people on the outside may think of the Pittsburgh Steelers from year to year, they always state their intention of competing for a championship. The Rooney family has set that mentality from the top down and that remains the expectation year in and year out. Sometimes it’s harder to believe than other years and 2025 might be the biggest example of that during the Mike Tomlin era.
“If you wanted to win a title in 2025, you would not have moved on from George Pickens,” Dave Dameshek said via 102.5 WDVE’s Morning Show with Randy Baumann this morning. “I’m resentful of the lie that they’re putting their best effort into winning a championship in 2025 when they just ran away the only other starter-level wide receiver, which put us right back where we were last year.”
The Pickens trade hasn’t been the only indication of the Steelers steering the ship toward the 2026 season. Omar Khan practically admitted that their decisions in free agency were guided by the compensatory draft pick system.
While that’s a smart move for the future of the organization, it’s hard to make an argument that the Steelers are fully focusing on positioning themselves to win in 2025.
Their biggest addition was DK Metcalf, and they used a 2025 second-round draft pick to trade for him. Otherwise, they signed Malik Harrison, Mason Rudolph, Brandin Echols, Daniel Ekuale, and Darius Slay. Only Harrison and Rudolph will count against their comp pick system, but they are balanced out by subsequent compensatory losses.
Slay was cut from his previous team and therefore doesn’t count against the comp pick system.
The main argument against Dameshek’s assertion is that they are pushing to sign Aaron Rodgers when they could be going full bore toward the 2026 plan. A poor performance in 2025 would mean a better draft pick next year and an easier time maneuvering in the draft.
While the Steelers are positioning themselves for the future more than they’d probably like to admit, completely giving up on the 2025 season would be a bridge too far outside the Steelers’ core philosophies.
Instead, their current plan seems to be straddling the line between preparing for the future and competing in the present. It’s a tough strategy to get behind given their lackluster results over the last decade.
Mike Tomlin has said multiple times that his players work too hard for him to have attention on anything other than winning in the present. Can the Steelers look them in the eyes this offseason and tell them that same thing. And would the players even believe them?
