The Pittsburgh Steelers are going to do it again
Are you ready for some football? Honestly, no. But.... it.... IS.... BACK, baby.
The NFL season is back with teams, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, returning to training camp. There is an NFL preseason game this month. Let’s talk about the 2025 Pittsburgh Steelers.
If we are being honest with ourselves we all probably already know how this Pittsburgh Steelers is going to go. The template is already set.
They are going to enter the season with a roster that everybody projects to be bad or not good enough, we will hear about how their style is outdated, every game will be an absolute slop-fest that is a chore to watch, and then you will look up in December and see they are somehow 10-5 and just need win more win to clinch a playoff spot. They will get it, or the necessary help they need, and then they will lose to a team in the wild-card round that has a better quarterback than them.
You’re kidding yourself if you think this season is going to go any other way.
It’s in the cards.
It’s what they do.
It’s who they are and who they have become.
The frustrating thing about this particular team and this particular season is … I don’t actually hate the roster overall. I kind of like it in some areas.
If you go position-by-position and do a comparison of this year vs. last year on paper, there’s a strong argument to be made they are either the same, or better, at virtually every position. The only position where they may have legitimately downgraded is at safety where they traded Minkah Fitzpatrick and are replacing him — for the time being — with Juan Thornhill.
But even that downgrade in the secondary comes with what should be a significant upgrade at cornerback with Jalen Ramsey and Darius Slay coming in to replace Donte Jackson and Cameron Sutton. I don’t know how that alignment is going to work with Joey Porter Jr. still starting at one of the outside spots, and I know Ramsey and Slay are getting older, but that’s still three very good NFL cornerbacks. Those guys can still get it done, and at a reasonably high level.
They still lack a true No. 2 wide receiver like they did a year ago, but DK Metcalf is a better No. 1 than George Pickens.
With Jonnu Smith joining Pat Freiermuth and Darnell Washington they can actually effectively run the two-and three-tight end sets Arthur Smith likes.
I hate to say this because I respect his style and the WAY he played, but I feel like Najee Harris is a case of addition by subtraction and that Kaleb Johnson, Jaylen Warren and Kenneth Gainwell will be an extremely effective running back trio.
I don’t know what to expect from Broderick Jones at left tackle, but the return of Troy Fautanu should help the offensive line.
They still have three tremendous outside pass-rushers and added some serious run-stuffing muscle in the draft with first-round pick Derrick Harmon, fourth-round pick Jack Sawyer and fifth-round pick Yahya Black. Adding Harmon to a defensive line that already has Cam Heyward and Keeanu Benton has the potential to be a big upgrade.
The one big problem, and the one thing that’s going to hold them back, comes from the one position we have not mentioned yet.
The quarterback.
And that is where they completely turned over their entire room for the second year in a row (never a good sign) and are putting all of their trust into a 42-year-old Aaron Rodgers. It’s … certainly a choice. Not necessarily a good choice, but definitely a choice. The only real positive I see from it is that he’s working cheap and has no long-term commitment beyond this season. I just don’t know what he has left in the tank because he hasn’t had a truly good season in three years.
The best-case scenario is he produces what Russell Wilson did a year ago (and their numbers were shockingly similar on a per-game basis).
The worst-case scenario is he plays like complete ass or gets hurt and they still somehow win nine games instead of 10 or 11 and somehow sneak into the playoffs. I seriously believe that’s this team’s floor. They have done it for so long with garbage quarterback play that I don’t know how we aren’t all expecting it again no matter who lines up under center. The defense may not be as elite as THEY think it is, but it’s good enough to dominate mid-and lower-tier teams, beat the occasional good team and keep them in it.
Which brings us to one of the biggest criticisms of the modern-day Steelers — the way they play and they way they are built.
They spend more money on defense than any team in the league.
They spend less money on offense than almost any team in the league.
There is nothing overly innovative about their offense.
There are a lot of facts there, and the latter point is certainly fair — painfully fair — but I don’t know that it’s as big of a problem as it’s made out to be.
Especially as it relates to the focus on defense.
It’s not that the Steelers have not made significant investments in their offense. Almost every premium draft pick in the first four rounds going back to 2020 has been an offensive pick.
They acquired Metcalf this offseason and paid him what was, at the time, one of the biggest contracts in franchise history.
Their other big offensive addition, Jonnu Smith, was a Pro Bowl player a year ago.
One of the biggest reasons their offense is so cheap is because so many of their players are guys still on rookie contracts because of, again, their recent drafting history.
I also reject the idea that a running and defensive team can’t win in today’s NFL, mostly because we just watched a running and defensive team win the Super Bowl. That’s the thing that gets lost here — the team the Steelers WANT to be is, quite literally, the Philadelphia Eagles.
The Eagles have an utterly dominant defense. I don’t care what they SPEND on it, the reality is that their defense is the absolute strength of their team, and it’s dominant. While they have a good quarterback and two outstanding wide receivers, their identity on offense is running the football and wrecking the spirit of opposing defenses by physically overpowering them.
Keeping teams off the scoreboard and controlling the football will always win, as long as you’re good at those two things. The NFL might be different in terms of formations, the X’s and O’s and the types of personnel that are used, but it’s not that different in terms of how many points it takes to win and the way you can win.
In 2024 NFL teams averaged 217 passing yards and 22.8 points per game.
Do you know what NFL teams averaged in 2010, the last time the Pittsburgh Steelers played in the Super Bowl?
They averaged 218 passing yards and … 22 points per game.
Do you know what they averaged in 2008 when the Steelers most recently WON the Super Bowl?
They averaged 211 passing yards and …. 22 points per game.
There was a brief three or four year stretch where passing numbers and points erupted across the league, but those trends have rapidly reversed themselves. Defense has taken back over more than anybody wants to admit. The league isn’t as high-flying and high-octane as we keep being told it is.
The Steelers’ problem is they’re just not particularly good at playing the way they WANT to play.
The defense is pretty good. It’s not always great.
They want to run the ball. But they have not been effective at running the ball.
Add in the lack of a game-changing quarterback, and you have what we’ve been watching for the past few years.
There is a danger in falling into the mindset that you HAVE to play a certain way to win. If you have Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson or Joe Burrow at quarterback, by all means try to air it out and play a more aggressive offense. But the Chiefs (with Mahomes), the Bills (with Allen) and the Ravens (with Jackson) all have elite defenses that also help them win. The Ravens also have an elite running game.
The Bengals have the quarterback, but because their defense is an overflowing toilet they haven’t made the playoffs in two years.
If you don’t have a Mahomes, or an Allen, or a Jackson, or a Burrow and you try to play like you do, it’s not going to go well for you. The Steelers don’t have one of those guys. That doesn’t mean they can’t compete playing a different style. The style can work as long as they are good at it.
They haven’t been good enough at it.
Their best hope for this season is that everything comes together for them to actually be good at playing the way they want to play, and that Aaron Rodgers still has enough fumes left in his gas tank to give them enough of a passing game to actually compete in the playoffs.