It’s the day before the season starts, so I’ve waited long enough. It’s time for this year’s installment of my long-running series. Inevitably some people will comment that I should stop posting these. Tough luck for them. I’ll be doing this thread until the SDMB goes away or I die, whichever comes first. One thread a year. You guys can handle that.
The first thing you should notice is the title. I’ve decided this year to take it head-on to avoid the inevitable “HURR DURR STEELERS WAY!” insults. So let’s get it out of the way right in the beginning: the Steelers should have suspended Bell and Blount each for 4 games. But they didn’t, and therefore the Steelers are no better than any other team when it comes to dealing with trouble players. As a fan it embarrasses me. Life goes on.
Anyway, last year’s 8-8 season started disastrously, and in a way it ended disastrously at the foot of Ryan Succop and two atrocious calls by the referees in the Chiefs-Chargers game. The real disaster wasn’t that they didn’t make the playoffs, though that was certainly not something calculated to make any Steelers fan happy. No, the real tragedy is that because of the monster second half of the season the team retained Todd Haley. Now we get another year of dink-and-dunk, modified MartyBall nonsense that will go nowhere, only to have the no-huddle make it look really good throughout the season. Here comes bubble-screen heaven. Yay. I would like to state for the record, irrevocably, that Todd Haley should be fired. Unfortunately, that means that the offense will have to suck. What a quandary.
That is further complicated by the fact that the Steelers have what might be the easiest schedule in all of football. In their first 10 games they get the Browns twice, the Ratbirds twice, the Panthers, Bucs, Jaguars, Colts, Texans, and Jets. That’s about as easy as it gets, with only the Rats and the Colts being teams that should strike any amount of fear whatsoever. Of course, being the Steelers, they’ll find a way to make every game close, but I can easily see 8-2 out of that. I can also see disaster, but I’m ignoring that because dammit, this is my damn thread and I’ll look through rose-colored glasses if I want to.
The offense has the aformentioned Doobie Brothers, Bell and Blount, so barring another ridiculous incident the running game ought to improve. Pouncey is back from his ACL tear and the O-line is shaping up to be decent, something every Steelers fan has said for the last decade and has never actually seen. Ben ought not take quite so many sacks this year, which should help prevent his usual annual debilitating injury. The receiving corps is suspect outside of Antonio Brown, who, in what is a pretty dumb plan, will also be returning punts. If he gets killed Ben has essentially nobody to throw to outside of Heath Miller. Yet for all that they ought to be able to move the ball, if not in a prolific manner. It is to all appearances a typical grind-it-out Steelers offense, an anachronism in today’s high-powered passing league but still effective.
On defense the big news is Ryan Shazier. He appears to be everything he was expected to be and more. The D has gotten younger overall, though it still has Goddamn Ike Taylor there to make every passing play into an exercise in torture. Polamalu may be entering his last year and while everybody is saying he has lost a step he’s still better than most of the rest of the league. He’ll be just fine. They also got Mike Mitchell at safety and resigned Da Beard. Mitchell ought to be a solid pass defender and Keisel should shore up a strangely porous run defense. Weird that the defense is the concerning factor on a Steelers team, but there it is.
Of course, the rest of the division is no great shakes. The Browns are, well, the Browns, always at least a year away from anything. Without Josh Gordon they are DOA, and if they play Johnny Clipboard he’ll become the next Browns starting quarterback failure to go onto the jersey. The Bengals will go only as the erratic folds-under-pressure Andy Dalton takes them. Same goes for the Ratbirds, helmed once again by the salary-cap-sucking Joe Flacco. So they went undefeated during preseason. So did the 2008 Lions. I remain unconcerned.
So there you have it, a reasonably clear-eyed analysis of the Steelers and their chances. This year is going to be interesting, to say the least. That said, the Steelers ought to make the playoffs, where anything can happen.
As for the NFC, it’s the Seachickens and everybody else. The only thing in doubt in the NFC is whether or not the Cowboys can set the all-time record for points surrendered in a season (533 by the 1981 Colts). The Cowpokes might become the first team to give up 600 points. They will be historically bad. It will certainly make Sundays fun at home, what with Robin being a Dallas fan and me being a well-known hater. But really, nobody seriously doubts that Seattle is the class of the NFC, do they?
In closing, I’m predicting 12-4 and a division championship, which ought to get at least the 3 seed and a game against the wild-card Bengals. The Bengals can’t get over that hump, so that ought to be a win. The Steelers will then upset the Broncos in Denver, beat the Patsies in Foxboro, and then take down the Seachickens in the Super Bowl. Remember, you heard it here first.
