It’s been a crazy offseason for Pittsburgh. After 19 consecutive winning seasons, a Super Bowl win, and a Super Bowl appearance, Mike Tomlin is not on the sidelines. I was hoping they would go young and take a chance on promise as they have the last 3 times since 1969, but instead they went with Mike McCarthy. And then they decided to run it back with Aaron Rodgers, who swears for real this time that he’s retiring at the end of this year. He also says that Dr. Fauci should be prosecuted for fraud, so listening to him in general is lunacy. But I digress.
I’m in a weird place this year. On paper they’re as competitive as they’ve been in years, but there have been so many changes. Prior to getting Pittman and Bernard at wide receiver and drafting Max I’llneverspellhisnameright it looked like this year it was finally going to come apart and they would rebuild. Instead they reloaded. But with McCarthy… I just don’t know.
As for how they finish, if you asked me the day they hired McCarthy I’d have said 6 wins, tops. But now they look better than they have in a while, and after years of everyone saying they’d fail this year for sure I’m going out on a limb and saying 10-11 wins. It’s a very thin limb, though. We’ll see how it goes.
Steelers fans do indeed have it better than Browns fans. Really, most fans do, the Browns will likely be getting a top-5 pick next year.
Reports of Watt’s demise were greatly exaggerated. He essentially owned the Falcons today along with Heyward and Highsmith. In fact, today Watt became only the second ever with 100+ sacks and 10+ interceptions, and the other, Julius Peppers, is now in the Hall of Fame.
That said, they ended up with a close game against a Falcons team led by Cooper Rush, and Bijan Robinson nearly got 200 yards of total offense. Against an actual potent offense, with Joey Porter, Jr.’s status still up in the air, that’s not going to cut it. And the offense was adequate but DK Metcalf committed two fouls, caught a ball out of bounds because he lost track of where he was, and straight dropped a gimme across the middle at an important time. He needs to figure it out.
But for a good number of the starters, this was their first game action, so I’m going to simply attribute everything to rust and hope I’m right. But some things never change, and even with a new coach the Steelers still tried to kill me today.
Funny game. Even though it was tight, and we tried to gift a win to the back up of the back up… if Roman Wilson holds on to that catch in the end zone, and/or the Refs don’t miss the blatant pass interference on the long throw to Metcalf, it feels like the game would’ve been securely in hand. Though it did help that Atlanta got called for holding on every other play.
