NFL Week 3 reactions and overreactions

Let's talk about some football.

The Pittsburgh Steelers won another Pittsburgh Steelers game. Being bad for a quarterback in the draft is usually a losing proposition. The Cincinnati Bengals can’t just point to Joe Burrow’s injury as an excuse. Buying and selling fast starts. And more!

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1. I think the takeaway that bothers me the most about Sunday’s Pittsburgh Steelers game is that they Steelers were somehow outplayed and that the New England Patriots deserved to win. If we’re being honest, neither team deserved to win that pig of a game. That was wretched football from beginning to end, and the Steelers probably WERE lucky to win because a better team would have taken advantage of their incompetent offense. But you can’t say you outplayed a team when you allow five sacks, record none of your own, turn the football over five times, and only force one of your own. Protecting the football and making big plays are a huge part of the game. And the Steelers were better at both of them than New England was.

Now, does that mean it was a good win?

Not necessarily.

It was a good win in the sense that it was a win, on the road, in the NFL. And that’s not always easy to do. The Green Bay Packers went on the road and lost to Cleveland. The Kansas City Chiefs went on the road to New York and barely escaped with a win over a terrible Giants team. This shit’s hard, man.

But beyond that detail, there wasn’t much encouraging from the actual play.

• The defense is great on first and second down, but completely incapable of getting off the field on third down. This baffles me.

• The offensive line is still a work in progress, and might not actually be very good. This goes back to last week’s discussion on talent evaluation.

• Aaron Rodgers has clearly lost to father time but has not quite adjusted his game to that fact. He can’t move. He doesn’t want to get hit. He looks bad for 90 percent of the game.

If you want to be charitable to the defense (you do not have to be) you can at least point to the fact they are down multiple starters and keep losing more.

The offense has no such grace area. Everybody that is supposed to be there is there. And it looks like every Steelers offense from the past five or six years. Inconsistent running game, no sustained drives, only scoring on a short field after a turnover and a once-great quarterback leading one big drive and making one big throw when needed to scratch out an ugly win.

The most psychotic thing about all of this is I think Mike Tomlin truly enjoys winning games this way. I think he loves it. I think he lives for it.

I would imagine most of the season goes this way. Again.

2. An angry fan called into the Fan on Monday morning and was pissed that the Steelers won because they should be, in their view, tanking for draft position and a quarterback in April.

If you are watching sports this way, especially in Week 3 of the season for a team that actually has a legitimate chance to make the playoffs, I just don’t know why you are watching sports. It seems like a truly miserable existence. Especially since it’s not even likely to produce the result you want.

This is also a perfect jumping off point for my reminder that tanking and picking a quarterback at the top of the draft is not necessarily a winning proposition. It fails more often than it works.

Allow me to show my work.

I went back over every quarterback taken in the top-10 between the 2012 and 2023 seasons and looked at what each of those teams did (and has done so far) from a win-loss perspective with those quarterbacks.

The overwhelming majority of them had (or have) losing records with the team that drafted them.

Sometimes awful records.

In fact, only 11 of the 24 quarterbacks taken in the top-10 during that time have actually had winning records with the team that drafted them, and it’s not exactly an encouraging list of names.

Here are the 11:

That’s it. That’s the list.

Here is the rest of the list.

A few thoughts and observations:

• Out of these 24 top-10 quarterbacks, how many of them were TRULY success stories with the teams that drafted them? Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen, obviously. Justin Herbert looks like he is on track to be one. Joe Burrow is obviously one of the best quarterbacks in the league when healthy, but he’s been surrounded by a fraud organization. Andrew Luck was great for a while. Jared Goff had his moments with the Rams but didn’t excel until he went somewhere else. But who else do you love here? I want to believe in C.J. Stroud, but nothing about that situation is encouraging right now. How do you feel about Tua? Mitch Trubisky is high up there! It’s not exactly a great success rate in terms of winning and losing.

• I know what your next response might be here: Win-loss record isn’t a quarterback stat. It’s a team stat. But that’s the point. THAT. IS. THE. POINT. When you’re picking at the top of the draft you’re generally a very bad football team with holes all over the roster. It’s really hard to find a good quarterback in the draft. It’s really hard to plug a lot of holes. It’s even harder to try and do both of those things successfully. A lot of these guys failed because they were not good NFL quarterbacks. A lot of them failed because they got stuck on bad teams. A lot of them failed for both reasons.

• It should not be lost on you that three of the top-four quarterbacks in this group in winning percentage were selected in the top-10 by good teams that traded up into the top-10 to pick them. The Chiefs picked Mahomes after a 12-win season where they played in the divisional round of the playoffs. The Bills picked Allen after a playoff season. The Rams traded up for Goff from the middle of the first round (okay, maybe they weren’t good, but they were at least somewhat competitive). The fourth guy in the top-four, Luck, had success but his team did such a bad job protecting him, and he took such a hellacious beating, that he just randomly walked away from football in the prime of his career. The Bengals should take a lesson from that with Burrow.

• The best model to follow isn’t a tanking model. It’s the “be a good team, collect draft assets, and trade up to land a player that can be put into a good situation” model.

• Even then it’s not a given because evaluating quarterbacks is a mostly lose proposition. Almost nobody is good at it, and it’s getting even harder with the way quarterbacks are being developed at the lower levels. It’s a different game and a different position now. And it’s not necessarily for the better when it comes to player development.

Let’s talk about more football stuff, including the Cincinnati Bengals and how Joe Burrow’s injury is going to give cover to a front office and coaching staff that’s done a bad job building a contender.