Breaking news: The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Surprising Collapse due to…….

Breaking news: The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Surprising Collapse due to…….

A month ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers were in the midst of one of football’s most impressive periods of achieving more with less. The Steelers were 7-4 entering Week 13 despite a restricted (read: terrible) quarterback in Kenny Pickett, a dismal offensive coach who had just been fired, and a defense that gave up yards by the bushel. Despite losing the yardage advantage in each of the previous nine games, the squad has already been the first in league history to finish above.500 after nine games. The game against the 2-10 Arizona Cardinals on December 3rd would be at

home, as would the game the following week against the New England Patriots, who had only two wins. Despite Pittsburgh’s weaknesses, both opponents should have been easy pickings for a playoff-bound club—but instead, the Steelers made history by becoming the first team with a winning record to lose consecutive games to teams with a record of eight games below.500. Another defeat came last Saturday against the Indianapolis Colts, who allowed the Steelers to get out to a 13-0 lead before scoring 27 points in a row. Head coach Mike Tomlin’s club is at 7-7, making the AFC playoffs a distant chance.

Can a football team’s downfall be both predictable and unexpected? Yes, according to the Steelers. Nobody paying attention felt the Steelers’ formula of being outplayed for the majority of the game but still winning was sustainable. (At least one team member mentioned this while the cameras were rolling.) But the Steelers’ performance in their last three games has been more than just a return to earth. Instead, it’s an all-time cratering that accomplishes two things: For one thing, it establishes a new norm for how many diverse paths a team can take at the same time. And, two, it takes a proud club with as many Super Bowls as anybody else (six) to admit that its long-standing recipe has failed.

The Steelers are a study in futility. Maybe they’ll learn something from it, maybe they won’t. However, the entire globe can gawk at the shambles they’ve made. Because it is incredible. Naturally, the incident has reignited what was once a minor discussion about whether the Steelers should break ways with Tomlin, their relatively successful coach for the past 17 seasons. But there’s wreckage to sort through before deciding if the Steelers should take that severe move.

The Steelers’ on-field issues are varied and not unique. They have second-year quarterback Pickett, whom they drafted in the first round out of the adjacent University of Pittsburgh. Pickett has been abysmal, but he’s also spent nearly his entire career working under a lousy offensive coordinator, Matt Canada. Canada was fired by the Steelers a week before the losing streak began, but the two assistants who succeeded him by committee have both performed poorly. (The only good spot was that the Steelers gained 400 yards in their first game after Canada, snapping the NFL’s longest skid by any club, 58 games.)

Pickett was injured in the loss to Arizona. His backup, former No. 2 overall draft pick Mitchell Trubisky, is similarly awful, and he was benched at the end of the team’s most recent loss to Indianapolis. 2023 has been a year of competent backup performance throughout the league, with a variety of journeymen and late-round draft picks rising to keep their teams in contention for the playoffs. In the AFC North, the Cleveland Browns have won games with fifth-round rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Joe Flacco, a former Baltimore Raven who was out of football but is now 2-1 with Cleveland. Jake Browning, who went undrafted in 2019 and had never played in an NFL game before, has led the Cincinnati Bengals to a 3-1 record.

The Steelers have received nothing of the type from any of their quarterbacks as a result of the team’s unimaginative offensive plan and inability to develop offensive skill. The team has also allocated opportunities in an inefficient manner. There are two running backs in Pittsburgh. Jaylen Warren, the good one, signed as an undrafted free agent last year. Najee Harris, the awful one, was a first-round pick in 2021. The Steelers frequently give Harris the ball because benching him would imply that drafting him was a waste of time. And, like with any bad team, the Steelers have had some bad luck. Injuries have destroyed their defense’s middle, wiping off the majority of its inside linebackers and safeties. Another safety is out for the remainder of the season after being charged with too many illegal hits.

Some teams deal with their academic challenges and grow as a result of them. Others contribute to the NFL’s image as an entertainment powerhouse by devolving into soap operas. The Steelers have been doing the latter all year. There was the occasion when a star safety and a receiver got into a locker-room brawl that made national headlines. There was the time Diontae Johnson generated an entire news cycle by extravagantly celebrating a meaningless score at the conclusion of a defeat, and there was the time he waited around watching while the opposition recovered a fumble right next to him and sprinted away with it. (The following week, Johnson apologized.)

Johnson hasn’t even been the Steelers’ most prominent source of wideout turmoil. That has been George Pickens, Georgia’s second-year target. Pickens is a tremendous deep threat, but he’s been misused due to a combination of factors, including bad schematics, teams game-planning to stop him, his own inability to get open, and the ineptness of his quarterbacks. It doesn’t help that Pickens reacts to his lack of output by sulking every week. During the loss to Indianapolis, he refused to block for running back Warren, stepping aside and allowing Warren to be tackled just short of a touchdown. Pickens told reporters that he was attempting to avoid an injury and that the criticism was coming from individuals who don’t play football. Then Tomlin and a couple of his football teammates got in. “If I was in that position, I would have blocked for him,” he remarked. It’s worth noting how fatigued Pickens’ teammates must be to publicly and openly criticize him.

Pickens will play against the Bengals on Saturday, according to Tomlin. It was a feat in itself that this was ever a question—that it was reasonable to wonder if the Steelers would sit one of their two talented wideouts in a must-win game because he had become such a pain in the ass. Meanwhile, the Steelers’ finest player, linebacker T.J. Watt, is quoted as saying that the team has players who do not practice hard. Whatever Tomlin has tried to reach out to his players hasn’t worked.

All of the Steelers’ problems point to one thing: something is broken at the core. Unacceptable quarterback performance? Even when longstanding standout QB Ben Roethlisberger was ailing, the Steelers worked around it in the past. When the Steelers were good, anyone stepped in for a game or two was expected to play admirably and keep the train running. Big personalities causing havoc in the locker room? Over the years, the Steelers have had a number of these guys. When Tomlin led teams in the late 2010s that had high-maintenance players like Roethlisberger, receiver Antonio Brown, tailback Le’Veon Bell, and famously prickly offensive coordinator Todd Haley, he demonstrated Nobel Peace Prize-worthy qualities. The Steelers kept most of their squabbles to a minimum, keeping it out of the public eye, and they had some of the league’s finest offenses.