Poor start to NFL season
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The Pittsburgh Steelers are threatened with the end of a long series
Pittsburgh The Pittsburgh Steelers have not had a negative record in the NFL since 2003 – an extraordinary achievement. After five days of play, this series is wobbling. There is still reason for hope.
Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin is known for his extraordinary rhetoric. He coined sentences wie: “We want volunteers, not hostages” when asked about players willing to change, or: “Don’t blink. If you’re someone who blinks, cut off your eyelids” as motivation before a difficult game. After his team’s 3:38 last Sunday in Buffalo, however, he didn’t need any of his sayings and soberly stated: “We were smashed.”
“The standard is the standard” is another “Tomlinism”, as the coach likes to call it, and has become a motto of the Steelers. It sums up what this NFL franchise is all about: it’s expected to be good and to win. Pittsburgh has won six Super Bowls, nobody has more, only the New England Patriots as many. The Steelers won a Super Bowlhe Tomlin In 2009, 2011 he reached another final. Things haven’t been particularly successful in the playoffs since then, but what Tomlin and the Steelers are doing overall is impressive.
They haven’t finished a season with fewer wins than losses since 2003, and the record has always been at least even. This applies accordingly to Tomlin’s entire head coaching career, die 2007 in Pittsburgh – as only the third head coach since 1969. No other NFL team has had ei for as long in a rowto offer a positive balance. The Kansas City Chiefs are second here, having had more losses than wins since 2012. After that come the Tennessee Titans, who last did so in 2015. But the Pittsburgh Steelers series is wobbling this year.
In week one, they won narrowly and happily at the Cincinnati Bengals, four defeats have followed since then. The “smashing” of Buffalo was the temporary low point, even if the opponent was of course one of the absolute top teams in the league. However, it clearly showed that the Steelers are currently far from the top level. Of course, superstar TJ Watt, the league’s best defensive player in 2021, is missing, but the fact that his current injury alone caused such a lack of a chance is worrying.
Because it’s supposed to be defense, the most expensive in the NFL, that helps this team win. But without Watts, the Steelers’ defense is shockingly weak. Since joining the team in 2017, Pittsburgh has never won without their star player be able. Fortunately, he has “only” missed eight games so far, four of them this season. And there will probably be at least three more in which the Steelers have to play against the strong Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Philadelphia Eagles, among others. It’s not out of the question that the Steelers will go into the non-game week with a record of one win and seven bankruptcies. To then avert another season with a negative win-loss ratio, eight of the remaining nine games would have to be won. But that’s all still hypothetical.
Because with all the problems that this team has, there are also positives. The move from quarterback to rookhe Kenny Pickett, for example, seems to be spot on. After the retirement of legend Ben Roethlisberger, Pickett is to shape a new era. At first he was a substitute to be introduced slowly. After dismal offensive performances, the more experienced Mitch Trubisky was finally replaced by Pickett – and the 24-year-old has been doing a decent job so far. Although he hasn’t quite been able to turn things around (in only a game and a half), his performances give us courage for the future and that the Steelers may actually have found their Roethlisberger successor here. Even if the season goes haywire, Pickett at least has time to adjust to the NFL level.
But with a look at the players around him, there is also short-term hope. The offensive line, identified as the biggest construction site before the season, plays surprisingly well and the running backs, wide receivers and tight ends are strong anyway. The fact that things are still not going well offensively is made clear by Matt Canada, the offensive coordinator. Since Tomlin is a head coach ist, who is more defensively focused, the offense is mostly in Canada’s hands – and so far he has not brought the team’s unquestionable horsepower to the streets.
After Sunday’s Buffalo game, Tomlin didn’t rule out the possibility of some changes this week, including in the coaching staff. “If you’re playing like we’re playing today, then you have to be open to doing whatever it takes to change the outcome of those games,” he said. “You can now draw whatever conclusions you want. That’s just the reality in our business at this level.” Two days later, however, he put the whole thing into perspective a little – in his very own way: “I won’t change anything just to change something, to shoot a hostage.”
Tomlin will do everything to finish the season again on a positive note. But not to keep his series going. That shouldn’t interest him. Nor does he care that a bad season would leave the Steelers early in the draft for once and pick an exceptional college player. This is not up to standard. “Winning is our business,” the 50-year-old likes to say. It doesn’t matter how bad the odds are, because: “We don’t live in our fears.”
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