A month ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers were in the midst of one of football’s great stretches of doing more with less. Despite a limited (read: bad) quarterback in Kenny Pickett, a woeful offensive coordinator who had just been fired, and a defense that gave up yards by the bushel, the Steelers entered Week 13 with a 7–4 record. The team had already become the first in league history to sit above .500 through nine or more games despite losing the yardage margin in each of them.
That Dec. 3 game against the 2–10 Arizona Cardinals would be at home, as would the following week’s clash with the New England Patriots, who also had all of two wins to their name. Despite Pittsburgh’s flaws, both opponents should have been quite easy pickings for a playoff-bound squad—but instead, the Steelers made more history, by becoming the first team with a winning record to lose consecutive games to teams eight games under .500. Yet another loss followed last Saturday against the Indianapolis Colts, who let the Steelers jump out to a 13–0 lead before scoring 27 in a row. Head coach Mike Tomlin’s team sits 7–7 now, a long shot to make the AFC playoffs.
Can a football team’s decline be foreseeable and shocking at the same time? The Steelers say yes. Nobody who was paying attention thought the Steelers’ formula—get outplayed for most of the game but somehow win anyway—was sustainable. (At least one member of the team said as much with recorders rolling.) But what the Steelers have done in their past three games has been more than a fall back to earth. Instead, it’s been an all-time cratering that does two things: One, it sets a new standard for how many different ways a team can unravel at the same time. And two, it requires a proud franchise that still has as many Super Bowls as anyone else (six) to acknowledge that its longtime formula has failed.
The Steelers are a case study in collapse. Maybe they’ll learn from it, and maybe they won’t. But the whole world can rubberneck at the mess they’ve created. Because it is astonishing. Naturally, the situation has ignited what used to be a fringe debate over whether the Steelers should part ways with Tomlin, their mostly successful boss of 17 seasons. But to figure out whether the Steelers should take that drastic step, there’s wreckage to sift through.
The Steelers’ problems on the field are multifaceted and not unique. They have one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL, second-year man Pickett, whom they drafted in the first round out of the neighboring University of Pittsburgh. Pickett has been atrocious, but he’s also spent almost his entire career with an incapable offensive coordinator, Matt Canada. The Steelers fired Canada a week before this losing streak began, but the two assistants who have replaced him by committee have also been bad. (The lone bright spot was that the Steelers gained 400 yards in their first game post-Canada, snapping the NFL’s longest streak by any team, 58 games, of not reaching that threshold.)
In the loss to Arizona, Pickett got hurt. His backup, former No. 2 overall draft pick Mitchell Trubisky, is also very bad, and he got himself benched at the end of the latest loss, to Indianapolis. 2023 has been a year of competent backup play across the league, with all kinds of journeymen and late-round draft picks emerging to keep their teams in the playoff hunt. Just in the Steelers’ AFC North, the Cleveland Browns have won games with the likes of fifth-round rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Joe Flacco, the former Baltimore Raven who was out of football but is now 2–1 with Cleveland. The Cincinnati Bengals have gotten a 3–1 record out of Jake Browning, who went undrafted in 2019 and had never played an NFL game before.
