Where do the Steelers go from here?
No organization in professional sports is more stable than the Pittsburgh Steelers. Since 1969, they've had three head coaches. Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, Mike Tomlin. That's it.
The Las Vegas Raiders, meanwhile, are about to hire their third head coach in three years.
Those long tenures obviously indicate success in Pittsburgh. All three coaches won Super Bowls and made the playoffs more often than not. However much one wants to ascribe that success to ownership, senior management, or just organizational infrastructure, the Steelers have undoubtedly been on a remarkable run of competence. Even the New England Patriots fell apart eventually.
But could the Steelers be at a crossroads? It seems impossible for a franchise that doesn't do rebuilds, but the stakes for Saturday night's showdown with the Baltimore Ravens are unusually high.
Pittsburgh roared to a 10-3 start, far exceeding preseason expectations and more than justifying its unusual stopgap decision under center - to pair a couple of bargain-bin castoffs, one old and one young, and figure it out on the fly. Neither Justin Fields nor Russell Wilson reminded anyone of Pro Bowlers, but they did enough to allow the Steelers, backed by another strong defense, to win ugly - which has often been their thing.
Then Pittsburgh hit the absurd part of its schedule in which the team played three times in 10 days, the last on Christmas Day. Suddenly, it all went poof. The Steelers were hammered by the Philadelphia Eagles and the Ravens. And then they got blown out 29-10 by the Kansas City Chiefs, who hadn't been blowing anyone out. That defeat cost the Steelers the AFC North lead and, after a long rest, they lost once more in Week 18, scoring only 17 points against a Cincinnati Bengals team they'd scorched for 44 points a month earlier.
After returning from injury in Week 7, Wilson, 36, looked nothing like the checkdown artist he became in his two seasons with the Denver Broncos. He was launching deep balls again. But then he started to play more like the guy that the Broncos paid tens of millions of dollars to get rid of. George Pickens, Wilson's target on most of those deep balls, started to struggle. He had just one catch on six targets for zero yards in Week 18 against the Bengals, who fired their defensive coordinator this week.
All of that is already enough cause for concern in Pittsburgh, especially since the Steelers will play the same Ravens team that beat them 34-17 three weeks ago. But there's also the wider context of the Tomlin era. He won a Super Bowl in his second season as head coach and has famously never had a losing campaign in 18 years on the job. But he's also 8-10 in the playoffs, and he's won just three postseason games since losing to Green Bay in the Super Bowl in 2010. It's been eight years since Pittsburgh's last playoff victory.
Tomlin, to his credit, owns this. "Many of these guys involved do not tote those bags," he told reporters this week. "I happily tote those bags."
The "happily" part can be debated, but he's right in that many of his current Steelers can't be blamed for the fact that they were thumped by the Chiefs when 39-year-old Ben Roethlisberger played his last game three years ago, or that they somehow gave up 45 points to a Jacksonville Jaguars team led by Blake Bortles in 2018.
But if Pittsburgh loses on Saturday, the playoff victory drought becomes nine years, and Tomlin's postseason record drops to three games below .500. Would the team run it back with Tomlin in Year 19? Would the Steelers try a different solution to the quarterback question and see if that can break the playoff losing streak?
Yes and yes, most likely. As much as Tomlin accepts the blame for recent playoff struggles, the Steelers did keep Roethlisberger around at least a few seasons too long, and their baseline competence under this coach has meant that they haven't had the high draft pick that might have given them the type of quarterback prospect they haven't had in the post-Big Ben era. They could have bottomed out after Roethlisberger retired but, instead, they had winning records in all three seasons and made the playoffs the last two. Moving on from Tomlin now would be like blaming him for not letting Pittsburgh be lousy enough to restock its roster. Sorry, coach. You should have lost more.
Still, one could forgive Steelers fans their frustrations. Noll's run of four Super Bowl titles in the 1970s set expectations extremely high. It took Cowher 14 years to win his only title. But a drought is a drought, even if Tomlin did prove his playoff chops all those years ago. His last real postseason run came with that Super Bowl loss to the Packers, back when Aaron Rodgers was just 27 and hadn't won any of his four MVPs yet.
The point is, it's been a minute.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.