The Steelers look B-A-D

There is not much to get excited about here.

If you are a Pittsburgh Steelers fan that is under the age of, let’s say, 45 or so. You probably have no idea what a truly bad football team looks like. You might think you do, but you really don’t. Because during that time the Steelers have not ever really been bad.

They have had some off years. They have had some rebuilding years. But even then it is only a temporary blip on the radar, a one-year anomaly, and even then it is never really that bad.

A bad season for Steelers fans is Eight wins. Maybe a random six or seven win season every 25 years. But they always bounce back and rebound.

Go back as far as the 1988 season and the Steelers have only had four — FOUR!! — losing seasons during that 33-year run. None of them have happened in the past 18 years. Of those four losing seasons, their win totals were 6, 7, 7, and 7. Even those seasons are more mediocre than truly bad, and they were almost always followed by a winning season or even playoff season. Even the 1980s, which older, long-time Steelers fans speak of like they were some awful decade were not THAT bad. They only had three losing seasons in the 80s, still made the playoffs several teams, reached an AFC Championship game (1984), and were a one-point loss on the road in Denver from reaching another AFC Championship game (1989). You have to go all the way back to 1969 (Chuck Noll’s first year as head coach) to find the last time this franchise won fewer than five games in a full season.

But this year’s team?

This team might be truly bad.