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Brooke Pryor, ESPN Staff Writer
PITTSBURGH — The last thing members of the Pittsburgh Steelers see before reaching the inner sanctum of their locker room at Acrisure Stadium are steely silver letters mounted on a black cinder block wall. They spell out the same phrase coach Mike Tomlin repeats countless times a day: The Standard is the Standard.
With six Lombardis proudly displayed in the trophy case, the established standard of the prestigious franchise is a world championship. But with five straight postseason losses dating back to 2016, the Steelers have fallen short.
This year they enter Saturday’s prime-time wild card game against the Baltimore Ravens (8 p.m. ET, Prime Video) having finished 10-7 — but on a four-game losing streak that cost them the AFC North title.
It’s been eight years since their last playoff win and 14 years since a Super Bowl berth. Tomlin’s lone Super Bowl win was nearly 16 years ago.
“What you mentioned is my story,” Tomlin said Monday, asked about the streak of playoff losses. “It’s not this collective’s story. Many of these guys involved do not tote those bags. I happily tote those bags, but it’s not something that I’m going to project on the collective.”
Exactly 357 days earlier, Tomlin expressed the same sentiment to the Steelers’ team website ahead of the Steelers’ last attempt to break the cycle, a wild-card loss at the Buffalo Bills.
“It’s not their burden to bear,” Tomlin told the site last January. “I don’t ask them to tote my luggage. I don’t project my luggage onto them. … Sometimes you’re kidding yourself if you think history like that is important to guys who weren’t a part of it. It’s not.”
Despite the playoff skid, team owner and president Art Rooney II extended Tomlin a three-year contract extension prior to the 2024 season. But Rooney was also firm in his desire to snap the streak in last year’s end-of-season news conference.
“There’s an urgency,” Rooney said then of winning a playoff game. “I think everybody, myself, Mike, guys that have been on the team for a while … everybody, we’ve had enough of this. It’s time to get some wins. It’s time to take these next steps.”
And yet, despite appearing to take a step forward with a new quarterback room and an 8-2 start, the season-ending slide has seemingly put the Steelers farther away from breaking their one-and-done playoff cycle, let alone from a deep postseason run. The Steelers enter the playoffs in a frustratingly familiar spot as the albatross of the franchise’s longest playoff drought of the Super Bowl era enshrouds the legacy of a proud organization and the future Hall of Fame head coach who famously hasn’t had a losing season.
But to the Steelers faithful, never losing means a lot less if their team isn’t winning in the postseason.
EVEN IN THE wake of another first-round loss, members of the Steelers walked off the snowy Buffalo field a year ago feeling they were on the precipice of ending the drought. The team weathered a slew of injuries and inconsistent quarterback play to rally for the No. 7 seed.
With a solid, young nucleus of offensive skill position players — running back Najee Harris, wide receiver George Pickens and tight end Pat Freiermuth — to complement a veteran defense, the Steelers appeared a couple pieces away from being a contender.
“I do feel that we’re closer this year at this stage of the game than we were at this point last year,” Rooney said at the season-ending news conference. “I thought we had a really solid rookie class, a few guys that really stepped in as solid starters for the future. Need to do that again. Need to have another good draft class. I think we have a core group of players that we can compete [with.] I think the biggest thing we need is quality play at the quarterback position.”
For most of the season, the Steelers got that from Russell Wilson and Justin Fields. Bolstered by complementary football courtesy of a turnover-happy defense and Pro Bowl kicker Chris Boswell with a seemingly limitless range, the pair helped the Steelers to their best start since starting 11-0 in 2020. Through Week 14, the Steelers were tied atop the league with a plus-17 turnover differential, and the defense led the NFL with 28 takeaways, including another league-best 23 fumbles.
Pittsburgh clinched its playoff berth in Week 15 — the same weekend its losing streak began when the Eagles defeated them 27-13 and quarterback Jalen Hurts had three touchdowns and threw for 290 yards. At the time, Tomlin and the Steelers dismissed the idea that one bad performance against one of the league’s top NFC teams could snowball.
But the hairline fractures exposed by the Eagles spiraled into spider web cracks over the next three games. Double-digit losses to the Ravens and Chiefs followed, plus a close one to a Bengals team they beat in a shootout five weeks earlier.
“We’re not doing the fundamental things well enough,” Tomlin said after the Christmas loss to the Chiefs.
An offense that averaged 28 points and 372 yards per game in Wilson’s first seven starts managed 14 points and 259 yards per game in his last four.
“Everybody in this room got to want it,” linebacker Alex Highsmith said. “That’s the only way we’re going to move on and get better.”
Perhaps the most alarming of those losses was the regular-season finale to the Bengals where the offense mustered just 17 points and 193 yards of offense against a team that finished the season allowing 25 points and 348 yards per game and fired its defensive coordinator a day after the season.
The Steelers defense, too, seemingly regressed in that stretch. The Steelers forced three takeaways each in the four games prior to the Eagles loss, but beginning that week, they had five total in the final four games. Through the first 13 games, the defense was among the best in the league limiting teams to 18 points and 310 yards per outing. In that four-game slide, however, those numbers jumped to 27 points and 381 yards per game.
They finished 4-3 against teams who made the 2024 playoffs and 6-4 against non-playoff teams.
As a byproduct of the late-season slump, the Steelers fumbled away a two-game lead in the division and became just the third team in NFL history to enter the playoffs on a losing streak of at least four games.
“It’s important that we take the lessons learned from the last month,” Tomlin said. “Unfortunately, you probably learn more when there’s failure, and obviously we’ve experienced some of that, some of it not jaw dropping things or earth shattering things, more confirmation of things that we believe in or things that we engineer victory by.”
TWO PLAYERS ON the current roster have won a playoff game with the Steelers: Boswell and defensive tackle Cameron Heyward. With six field goals, Boswell accounted for all of the Steelers’ points in the 2016 divisional round win against the Chiefs. He also made four — including the game-winner — in the 2015 wild card win against the Bengals. Heyward, though inactive for the two 2016 playoff wins, forced a fumble in 2015.
Linebacker T.J. Watt has been on the roster for each of the last four playoff losses. In the regular seasons that preceded those winless postseasons, Watt tied Michael Strahan’s NFL sack record, won NFL Defensive Player of the Year and was named to four All-Pro teams. The Steelers had nine other first-team All-Pro selections, the NFL’s leading passer (Ben Roethlisberger, 2018) and leading receiver (Antonio Brown, 2017) in that period, too.
“It all sucks,” Tomlin said days after losing to Buffalo last year. “It does. It’s not degrees of suck. It all sucks. I’d rather be working. … It’s a really good feeling to be in that tournament as the road gets narrow and to be living out the things that you aspire to live out over the last 12 months. It’s not us, and it sucks.”
Even with significant roster turnover throughout the eight-year drought, there is an undeniable, troubling trend to the Steelers’ recent postseason woes.
In each of their last five playoff losses, the Steelers fell in a big hole early, trailed by at least a score at halftime and were outscored 105-38 in the first two quarters.
Tomlin, though, declined Monday to say if he’d learned anything from those losses to take into this year’s wild card game.
“To be honest with you, I hadn’t spent a lot of time pondering that in the last 48 hours,” he said. “I’ve been getting ready specifically for this game with this collective.”
In the 2016 AFC Championship Game, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots built a 17-6 advantage midway through the second quarter, and the Steelers never got closer than an eight-point halftime differential.
A year later, the Jacksonville Jaguars jumped out to a 21-0 lead in less than 20 minutes of game time with an opening possession score, an interception and two more quick touchdowns. The Steelers, who had a first-round bye as the No. 2 seed that year, fought back, but fell in a disastrous 45-42 loss that improbably marked the last playoff game for the trio of Roethlisberger, Brown and Le’Veon Bell.
A two-year postseason drought followed, but it didn’t dry up the Steelers’ recurring playoff problems.
Playing in front of empty stands at Acrisure Stadium at the end of the Covid-19 affected season, the Cleveland Browns stunned the Steelers six seconds into the wild card game when Maurkice Pouncey’s opening snap sailed over Roethlisberger’s head and bounced 20 yards in the wrong direction until Karl Joseph recovered it in the end zone for a touchdown. That snowballed into a 28-0 deficit by the end of the first quarter and a 35-10 hole at halftime. The Browns’ final margin of victory was just 11 points, but it hardly reflected the thorough beat down of a Steelers team that started out the season 11-0.
“We were a group that died on the vine,” Tomlin said after that loss.
The Steelers’ most recent playoff losses had more of the same lopsided starts, but in each of those, the results were somewhat expected as the Steelers, who clinched the AFC’s final playoff spot with a late-season rally, squared off against the league’s top teams on the road.
Facing No. 2 seed Kansas City in 2021 in Roethlisberger’s final game, the Steelers held serve in the first quarter and even went up 7-0 on Watt’s second-quarter scoop and score. But the Chiefs rattled off three straight touchdowns to take a 21-7 halftime lead and eventually won.
And in last year’s wild card loss, the Steelers trailed 21-0 midway through the second quarter and scored less than two minutes before halftime to cut their deficit to 14. A second-half surge pulled the Steelers within a score early in the fourth quarter, but the Bills responded with a surgical touchdown drive and held off the Steelers over the final six minutes to win 31-17.
“No team is the same as the previous year, so that’s always a challenge,” Watt said the next day. “But we’re going to have to take a long hard look and figure this thing out. I keep having the same conversation every year it seems.”
Unless the Steelers pull off the upset Saturday night, Watt will likely have that conversation for the fifth time in his career.
The outcome of the 2024 playoffs likely won’t dictate Tomlin’s legacy in Pittsburgh or his future as the head coach of the franchise. But as the team continues to come up empty in the playoffs, a display case waiting for trophies is instead filling up with baggage.