Right now the Pittsburgh Steelers and all of their fans are living with mixed emotions. Riding the high of a 28-14 win over the hated Cleveland Browns in the final game of the season to assure head coach Mike Tomlin gets his 16th straight winning season but at the same time having all that work to be meaningless in the big picture after they failed to make the playoffs.
And they have no one to blame but themselves. Pittsburgh got off to a miserable start this season. 2-6 in the first eight games and nothing was going right. Everyone was pointing fingers at everyone else and fans wanted the entire coaching staff fired.
But the reality is you look at three games. A Week 2 loss to the New England Patriots 17-14, a Week 4 loss to the New York Jets by a score of 24-20 and a Week 7 loss to the Miami Dolphins 16-10. All those losses were inexcusable but if the Steelers win just one of them, this is a completely different conversation.
The team now has to shake this off and start looking at what will be a very busy offseason in terms of personnel decisions. Hopefully the coaching staff learned something from this year in terms of how an entire offseason didn’t prepare this team but one bye week did and they don’t repeat that mistake.
Let us know in the comments how you feel about the season. Was it a success because of the nine wins or does missing the playoffs spoil the whole thing?
