The Astonishing Collapse of the Pittsburgh Steelers
There’s only one good way for Mike Tomlin to save his job now.
Steelers coach Mike Tomlin looking worried on the sideline, in a white cap and headset and Steelers jacket, pursing his lips and looking upward.
Yikes. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Joe Sargent/Getty Images.
A month ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers were in the midst of one of football’s great stretches of doing more with less. Despite a limited (read: bad) quarterback in Kenny Pickett, a woeful offensive coordinator who had just been fired, and a defense that gave up yards by the bushel, the Steelers entered Week 13 with a 7–4 record. The team had already become the first in league history to sit above .500 through nine or more games despite losing the yardage margin in each of them. That Dec. 3 game against the 2–10 Arizona Cardinals would be at home, as would the following week’s clash with the New England Patriots, who also had all of two wins to their name. Despite Pittsburgh’s flaws, both opponents should have been quite easy pickings for a playoff-bound squad—but instead, the Steelers made more history, by becoming the first team with a winning record to lose consecutive games to teams eight games under .500. Yet another loss followed last Saturday against the Indianapolis Colts, who let the Steelers jump out to a 13–0 lead before scoring 27 in a row. Head coach Mike Tomlin’s team sits 7–7 now, a long shot to make the AFC playoffs.
Can a football team’s decline be foreseeable and shocking at the same time? The Steelers say yes. Nobody who was paying attention thought the Steelers’ formula—get outplayed for most of the game but somehow win anyway—was sustainable. (At least one member of the team said as much with recorders rolling.) But what the Steelers have done in their past three games has been more than a fall back to earth. Instead, it’s been an all-time cratering that does two things: One, it sets a new standard for how many different ways a team can unravel at the same time. And two, it requires a proud franchise that still has as many Super Bowls as anyone else (six) to acknowledge that its longtime formula has failed.
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The Steelers are a case study in collapse. Maybe they’ll learn from it, and maybe they won’t. But the whole world can rubberneck at the mess they’ve created. Because it is astonishing. Naturally, the situation has ignited what used to be a fringe debate over whether the Steelers should part ways with Tomlin, their mostly successful boss of 17 seasons. But to figure out whether the Steelers should take that drastic step, there’s wreckage to sift through.
The Steelers’ problems on the field are multifaceted and not unique. They have one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL, second-year man Pickett, whom they drafted in the first round out of the neighboring University of Pittsburgh. Pickett has been atrocious, but he’s also spent almost his entire career with an incapable offensive coordinator, Matt Canada. The Steelers fired Canada a week before this losing streak began, but the two assistants who have replaced him by committee have also been bad. (The lone bright spot was that the Steelers gained 400 yards in their first game post-Canada, snapping the NFL’s longest streak by any team, 58 games, of not reaching that threshold.)
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In the loss to Arizona, Pickett got hurt. His backup, former No. 2 overall draft pick Mitchell Trubisky, is also very bad, and he got himself benched at the end of the latest loss, to Indianapolis. 2023 has been a year of competent backup play across the league, with all kinds of journeymen and late-round draft picks emerging to keep their teams in the playoff hunt. Just in the Steelers’ AFC North, the Cleveland Browns have won games with the likes of fifth-round rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Joe Flacco, the former Baltimore Raven who was out of football but is now 2–1 with Cleveland. The Cincinnati Bengals have gotten a 3–1 record out of Jake Browning, who went undrafted in 2019 and had never played an NFL game before.
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The Steelers have gotten nothing of the sort from any of their quarterbacks because the team has an unimaginative offensive scheme and no discernible ability to develop offensive talent. The team has also allocated opportunities poorly. Pittsburgh has two running backs. The good one, Jaylen Warren, signed as an undrafted free agent last year. The bad one, Najee Harris, was a first-round pick in 2021. The Steelers give the ball to Harris a lot because benching him would formalize that drafting him was wasteful. And like any bad team, the Steelers have also had some breaks go against them. Injuries have decimated the middle of their defense, taking out most of their inside linebackers and safeties. Another safety is out for the rest of the year because he got in trouble for making too many illegal hits.
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Some teams handle their struggles with class and grow from them. Others help the NFL’s status as an entertainment juggernaut by devolving into soap opera. The Steelers have dutifully done the latter all year. There was the time a star safety and a receiver got into a locker-room shouting match that was dramatic enough to become leaguewide news. There was the time that same receiver, Diontae Johnson, fueled a whole news cycle by elaborately celebrating a meaningless touchdown at the end of a loss, and the time he stood around watching as the opposition recovered a fumble right next to him and ran away with it. (Johnson apologized the following week.)
Somehow, Johnson has not even been the Steelers’ most significant source of wideout drama. That has been George Pickens, the second-year target out of Georgia. Pickens is a talented deep threat, but he’s found himself underutilized for a mixture of reasons—lousy schematics, teams game-planning to stop him, his own failure to get open, and the ineptness of his quarterbacks. It doesn’t help that Pickens responds to his lack of production by visibly sulking every week. During the Indianapolis loss, he declined to block for running back Warren, stepping aside and causing Warren to get tackled just shy of a touchdown. When reporters asked him about it, Pickens said he was trying to avoid an injury and that the criticism was coming from people who don’t play football. Then, Tomlin and a few of his teammates who do play football joined in. “If I was in that position, I would have blocked for him,” Warren said. It’s worth marveling at how exhausted Pickens’ teammates must be to air him out in such public and explicit terms.
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Tomlin told reporters that Pickens will play on Saturday against the Bengals. 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—was a feat in itself. Meanwhile, the team’s best player, linebacker T.J. Watt, reportedly says that the Steelers have players who don’t practice hard. Whatever Tomlin has done in an effort to reach his players hasn’t worked.
All of these woes point in one direction: Something about the Steelers is broken at the core. Unacceptable quarterback play? The Steelers have worked around it in the past, even when longtime star QB Ben Roethlisberger was injured. When the Steelers were good, it was expected that whoever stepped in for a game or two would perform passably and keep the train moving. Big personalities causing locker-room disruption? The Steelers have had a bunch of those players over the years. Tomlin displayed Nobel Peace Prize–worthy traits when he coached teams in the late 2010s with the high-maintenance likes of Roethlisberger, receiver Antonio Brown, tailback Le’Veon Bell, and famously prickly offensive coordinator Todd Haley on the same unit. The Steelers kept most of their discord minimal enough that it stayed out of public view, and they had some of the league’s best offenses.
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So what’s different this time? Theories abound as to why the Steelers cannot deboard the Hot Mess Express and play decent football in 2023. Maybe it’s that they no longer have a good quarterback. Maybe it’s that they lack the player leadership they once had. Maybe—and this is the best theory, I think—it’s that the head coach has hired bad assistant coaches and stuck by them out of misguided loyalty.
At any rate, it all goes back to the boss. Tomlin was involved in drafting Pickett, who shared a practice facility with the Steelers in college. Missing so badly on an evaluation of a player in such close proximity is damning, as is putting him in such difficult positions to succeed. Not firing Canada, the now-exiled offensive coordinator, after last season was outrageous. So was spending a first-round pick on bad running back Harris, and so was letting defensive assistant Brian Flores leave for the Minnesota Vikings after last year. Flores is one of the league’s best schematic innovators, and he’d probably do a better job than Steelers coordinator Teryl Austin, who just happened to be with the organization before Flores made a one-year stopover in 2022. Injuries aren’t in Tomlin’s control, and neither, entirely, is whether a perplexing but talented wide receiver decides to listen to him. But in the areas where Tomlin has traditionally exerted influence effectively, the Steelers have grown stale.
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The irony underpinning these failures is that Tomlin is, by any objective long-term measure, one of the greatest coaches of his time. Everything about his resume that was true a month ago is still true now. That puts the Steelers in an awkward position. They probably will not fire Tomlin, and they probably shouldn’t right now, given the likelihood that whoever replaces him will be much worse. But he’s coming up on seven seasons without a playoff win, the team’s longest drought since the 1980s. His calling-card achievement is a Super Bowl win in 2008, but next is that he’s never had a losing season in 17 tries. That streak might end in two weeks.
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Even if the Steelers finish strong, even if they get a fluky playoff spot before a quick elimination, the time has come for some introspection. Tomlin has earned the chance to bounce back from the biggest embarrassment of his tenure, but the Steelers need to find out if he’s interested in doing that. Will he make sweeping changes not just to his staff but to how he hires his staff, so that he finds the best candidates no matter where they are? Will he come forward with a plan to fix the team’s quarterback mess within a year or two? If Tomlin is ready to acknowledge that his approach needs big adjustments, then both parties would benefit from giving the relationship another year. If not, the time will have come when the Steelers and Tomlin should shake hands and move on. Tomlin would have some trade value if everyone decided that a change of scenery made sense. Maybe he’d help Pittsburgh get a quarterback in that way.
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There’s value in never being bad, but only a little bit, because being eternally OK denies any team the chance to draft a savior QB with an early pick. Splitting with Tomlin, then, finally makes a bit of sense. I think the Steelers should try to avoid that, and a better course of action would be for owner Art Rooney III to have a heart-to-heart with his coach and persuade Tomlin to alter his approach. But it’s unclear if Rooney has the chops for that. His lone qualification to own an NFL team is that his grandfather and father did before him. On his own, Rooney has achieved nothing of note, and Tomlin has made the Steelers’ football operation a self-sustaining entity that needs little from the man who inherited the franchise. But at the moment, the Steelers are an unavoidable mess. Their meltdown will soon be complete, and only then will we know what lessons they’ve taken from it.
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