The Steelers always seem to play to their competition anyways, so any of these games could go either way. Unfortunately, it feels like they'll never be out of it as long as Tomlin is there. He's dragged the corpse of Ben and rookie Pickett to nine wins each of the last two years, and it's hard to see how they'll be worse. Hopefully they'll start from their Pythag. baseline of 7-7.5 wins, but they always seem to win games they have no business winning. Their draft class seems to be pretty widely praised (thanks Bears giving up #32 for Chase Claypool where he put up 14-140-0 in seven games) so as long as Pickett can take the next step, I think they're a playoff team.
They could win 10 and miss the playoffs. The AFC is more stacked (on paper, injuries happen) than I can ever recall. 7 teams make it, let’s put in:
For as stacked as people claimed the AFC was last year, the NFC won interconference play by two games. It's going to be very tough for a 10-win team to miss a seven-team playoff.
A 10-win team hasn't even been the 7-seed yet three years into this. I think it would take a 2008 Pats kind of thing for one to miss the playoffs now.
The 2020 Dolphins missed the playoffs at 10-6.
Yeesh, that's a terrible miss on my part especially since it wasn't even via tiebreaker. The extra game from then creates a little less of a jumble, but it is possible. The AFC won interconference play by seven games that year while also having by far the two worst teams in the league - there's your recipe for a 10-win team missing by a full game.
And the Bears made the playoffs that same year with 8 wins. That is actually kind of funny.
Bravo. I came here to say exactly this.
You spend time at agh or upmc or pitt med?
