The Pittsburgh Steelers played a football game on a Monday night in September.
This came after a 30-7 implosion against the 49ers at Acrisure Stadium on September 10th. Soundly defeated in all facets, the Steelers looked like an unprepared, unfocused and undisciplined football club.
The offense managed seven points. The defense surrendered third-down conversions aplenty before accruing a stop. QB Kenny Pickett didn’t look like the passer from 2022. He looked awful.
After a full offseason, his first training camp as QB1 and a successful preseason, Pickett was demonstrably worse. How was this possible?
It wasn’t just that Pickett faced San Francisco, arguably the most complete team in football, as well as potentially the league’s best defense this year. He was missing open targets most of the day. The offense had one yard of offense late into the 2nd quarter.
The truth is what it has been for the last six years: Coach Mike Tomlin and a curse.
Pittsburgh’s football squad has reached the treading water stage in a sports franchise’s cycle. This is the worst possible frame to be in as a sports franchise. Treading water is delayed drowning.
Unlike in a sport like basketball, one prospect cannot save a football team. They call it the greatest team sport for a reason. Not even a gem at quarterback can overcome deficiencies in all other areas. Ask Andrew Luck.
Their stagnant position in this spot is buoyed by a poor team who simply finds ways to win on select days, usually through completely haphazard and unsustainable events and individual performances.
This is their curse. Wins like this, games you do not deserve to win but manage to anyway, do horrors for the wrong team.
Wins like this for the right unit can be team-building and foster belief and innovation but for the wrong squad can empower false realities, inflate egos and arrogances and keep consistently failing organizational philosophies on life support. The Steelers are that squad. They are worse now than they were five years ago, they have been trending down as a franchise for some time but these wins which literally defy reality allow them the same luxury.
This has been the life of the Steelers and their fanbase since that fateful playoff loss against Jacksonville in 2018. This roulette has only increased in regularity as well as absurdity.
September 18th, 2023 was a perfect demonstration of how cursed the Steelers truly are.
If there were any hesitations or deliberations about the season opener being a mirage, they were immediately put on hold when a tipped pass by Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson was intercepted and returned for a touchdown by Steelers edge rusher Alex Highsmith.
This event is not predictable nor is it something that can be prepared for or in almost all cases, created. A pick-six had not happened on the first play of a contest since New York Jets quarterback Sam Darnold threw one in 2018. That’s once in five years. Unsustainable.
Through one quarter, the Steelers offense managed 19 yards of offense. Identical to the week before, they also did not convert a first down in the opening frame.
At half, Pittsburgh had accomplished two yards rushing. Two, as in two more than zero. This after drafting Alabama running back Najee Harris in the first round two years ago, who Steelers’ brass promised would be the solution to the team’s rushing woes.
Through six quarter of the season, the black and gold rushing attack had amassed 17 carries for 38 yards.
Through two full games, Pittsburgh has just 96 rushing yards, their third-fewest since the 1970 merger, per Alex Kozora of Steelers Depot, who does great statistics work on Steelers football.
With the exception of a slant taken 70 yards for a score by receiver George Pickens, Pickett threw for 81 yards in the first half with a 50% completion percentage.
By the time the end of the contest appeared, the Steelers defense had accrued an interception and two fumbles, as well as a barrage of sacks on Watson.
The offense managed 12 points.
With the score 22-19 Cleveland, the result seemed inevitable. Not only could Pittsburgh not score, they couldn’t move the ball.
But as always seems to happen with the Steelers, the curse reared its ugly head once again.
Highsmith strip-sacked Watson and Steelers franchise star T.J. Watt, who would set the Steelers franchise record for sacks on this night, returned it for a touchdown. 26-22 Steelers.
It was the first time Pittsburgh had an interception and fumble both returned for touchdowns since 2009. Yet another fluke occurrence.
And so the Steelers would win a game they had no right winning, again.
In total, Pittsburgh finished with a porous nine first downs, including 4/14 on third down and 255 yards of offense. Cleveland won the time of possession battle by a smidge under 11 full minutes.
The Steelers defense, in a magical and not-to-be-expected-again performance, would score 14 points. The Pittsburgh offense managed 12 and this a week and a day after they scored seven.
That totals 19 points in two games, an average of less than 10 points a game.
At that pace, they would be one of the worst scoring offenses in NFL history, bested by only six teams and the worst since the 1992 Seattle Seahawks, who averaged 8.8 in a 16-game season.
It’s not just this year either. The Steelers are the only NFL team that hasn’t produced a 400-yard game on offense since 2021, when Matt Canada became the team’s second-straight offensive coordinator with no play-calling experience at the NFL level. In his now 37 games, the offense has failed to produce 20 points in regulation in 28 of those contests. (These statistics courtesy of Daniel Valente of The Score and Josh Rowntree of KDKA Radio)
But the Steelers did perhaps the worst possible thing they could have done after a performance like that: they won.
They gave themselves an out from all the justified criticism, the excoriation from media and fans alike, the constant slamming of the gavel, not only screaming but fervently demanding organizational reconstruction.
As long as an organization this myopic finds ways to win, no real change will happen. As long as this drought of true winning football and this plague of non-losing season football continues, nothing will change with the Pittsburgh Steelers, an irrelevant, laughingstock of a franchise who could not find an offense if you drew them a map for going on five seasons now.
After a loss and what would’ve been a thoroughly demoralizing one against archrival Cleveland at home in prime-time, Tomlin, the coaches and the players would have had to acknowledge their performance, or lack thereof, without any sugar-coating, excuses, or half-truths. They would have to face themselves in the mirror and perhaps even more importantly, reality.
But for many in not just sports but the world at large, the ends always justify the means. If the end goal is met, how you got there is not important. This is extremely flawed logic because poor processes lead to poor results and refusing to either acknowledge clear and obvious shortcomings or adjust failed approaches will deliver damning results in the near future.
The Steelers, however, won and so Tomlin, all too eager to run to the microphone for his post-game press conference, said with his first breath, “1-0 in the AFC North.”
He applauded heart and fight, things no viewer saw in his offense for the near entirety of the contest, start to finish.
“Thankful for the win, appreciate the efforts.”
Most unsettling of all, and any regular onlooker of the Pittsburgh Steelers could tell you this was coming, was Tomlin’s response when a member of the media asked him about his offensive unit’s abject failings, from the sloppiness in crucial downs to the inexistence of a running game to the uncomfortability of his quarterback to the play-calling of his coordinator.
“We’re not going to apologize for winning.”
Yes, winning.
Because even though the Steelers lost in total yardage, passing, rushing, yards per play, first downs, third down efficiency, total plays, punts and time of possession, they unfortunately won in the one category they could not afford to win: the scoreboard.
Next week, they travel to Vegas on the west coast. Pittsburgh has not won in Raiders territory since 1995.
An 0-3 start would have made ripples. People’s seats would have gotten hot. Maybe Tomlin, who has no sense of urgency to adapt since he has the safest job in all of American sports, would have felt a prickle.
But every year, high-end talent and fluky, unpredictable and most importantly, unrepeatable events bail him and his unit out from facing true accountability.
It is the curse that keeps holding Pittsburgh back from winning anything of importance.
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