Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-11-21 8:15PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Cleveland Browns
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Dallas Cowboys @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Detroit Lions @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM New England Patriots @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-11-24 1:00PM Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ New York Giants
Sun 2024-11-24 4:05PM Denver Broncos @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-11-24 4:25PM Arizona Cardinals @ Seattle Seahawks
Sun 2024-11-24 4:25PM San Francisco 49ers @ Green Bay Packers
Sun 2024-11-24 8:20PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Los Angeles Rams
Mon 2024-11-25 8:15PM Baltimore Ravens @ Los Angeles Chargers
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Notes -
Week 13 thread live: https://www.themotte.org/post/1268/weekly-nfl-thread-week-13
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Eagles came through a tremendous week last week, delivering beatings to two division rivals in the space of five days and asserting themselves as the overwhelming favorites to win the NFC East. After a rocky start, they seem to have mostly righted the ship behind two rookie CBs, noted violent freak Jalen Carter, and an offense that with Saquon Barkley and a great O-Line will get you eventually. The team continues to suffer from weak pass-rush production, their edge rushers are weak and most of their production results seems to result from Carter or another DT making the big play to break things down. And the weird mental lapses and turnovers continue to be an issue. But they made it through the toughest week on their calendar all year. Moving forward, they've got a lot of tough games left: against the Rams this weekend, then the Ravens and Steelers, and then to Washington. But only the Ravens game looks like they should be underdogs.
I would bet on the Rams if you fancy it. Stafford, Kupp, and Nacua are primed to execute the same gameplan that Mayfield and the Bucs used against the Eagles: quick passing to avoid pressure and stay marching up the field. Stafford has a quick time-to-release, and the Eagles pass rush when it succeeds at all is typically slow-developing. The Rams defense is first in pressure rate in the league, while their cornerbacks suck, but "put pressure on Jalen Hurts and dare him to get the ball out quickly" is basically the book on how to beat the Eagles most days. Hopefully Saquon can put them on their heels enough times that the Eagles can pull out the win, but the Rams are a tough well coached team as long as Stafford is under center, and their strengths and weaknesses match up well against the Eagles.
I love to see the Cowboys suffer, and things are looking worse than ever. The Cowboys have failed to win a single homegame through week 11 of the NFL season, only the Cowboys and the Giants share this distinction, and the Giants were known to be hunting for the #1 pick coming in, where the Cowboys were thought to be all-in super bowl contenders behind the highest paid players in league history. Love to see it.
Speaking of all-in teams that have turned into dumpster fires, at this point the Jets have over the past four years:
-- Drafted Sam Darnold #3 overall, sputtered, traded him
-- Drafted Zach Wilson #2 overall, sputtered, benched him to trade for
-- Aaron Rodgers. They rebuilt the team in his image, fired the head coach, and now the general manager. He will probably leave next year, whether he wants to retire or the Jets choose not to bring him back due to mediocre play.
What a disastrous run. I'm not sure we have many examples of that kind of concentrated futility in sports history, particularly when the defense has several stars, the team has jettisoned a good number of draft picks to get Rodgers and friends on the offense, and two of their former QBs are leading teams that look like playoff contenders elsewhere. The entire org is torn down at this point, Rodgers is going to leave very little behind him to build on. The Jets and Browns both looked like great defenses and solid offenses that just needed a competent QB to turn into contenders, both traded away assets and sold their organizational souls (the Browns far moreso) to acquire and placate those QBs, both orgs now look like dumpster fires. The core that they hoped to build around will pass on to other teams or decline before they contend again, some players have spent their whole peak toiling on Jets and Browns teams that never did anything. The agony of defeat, not just momentary but for years.
The NFL is seeing the results of their efforts to achieve parity: ratings are down in what were normally some of their largest markets in New England and New York. This is obviously related to all the teams there being total dumpster fires. The NFL, like all American sports leagues and arguably most successfully, has worked for decades to make sure that every dog has its day, that every team will have its year in the sun once out of every thirty. They've succeeded tremendously, only four teams (Broncos, Falcons, Panthers, Jets) haven't made the playoffs since 2020, and other than the Jets the other three made the Super Bowl within the memory of a high school senior. The goal of the NFL is based on the assumption that lifelong fandom starts with every kid, during their youth, seeing their local team put out a great product and make a deep playoff run. This model seems to work to build strong fanbases for every team, the NFL prints money relative to other leagues, despite its near total lack of international footprint compared to NBA/UEFA/etc. But, we're starting to see fans catch on: the league achieves parity over time by making it impossible to keep a great team together. Instead teams go all in for a championship run, then rebuild. The result is more teams than ever aren't even really trying to be good at football, and fans tune out. The Giants are benching Daniel Jones, who is mediocre but clearly the best QB on the roster, to avoid paying him any more money on his bad contract. What's the reason to watch a Giants game anymore? To see Tommy Devito's guido agent in the stands? Fans will just tune out until the Giants get good again. This is another example of businesses building procedures around customer tastes and practices, then customers shift their practices to maximize the value they can get in the deal. Why not just wait until the team is, if not good, at least trying? Fact is, I'm a fair weather fan. Right now the Eagles are good, and I like their identity as a team, I'm watching every game listening to podcasts I can tell you who their backup safeties are. If they start to suck, I'll still watch a few games but I'm not going to schedule my Sunday around it. I might attend more games if tickets get cheaper. But I'm not going to be obsessed again until they are better. I just don't do the whole fan gatekeeping thing now that I'm an adult, and I don't see why I should if the league is going to encourage the opposite behavior from the teams.
On a brighter note, the Bills-Chiefs game delivered on the wish of a Buffalo fan I met outside the Linc after last years rain soaked OT classic (the high point of the iggles season last year), who plaintively said "Just once I want the Bills to win the game of the year..." I'm not sure it was quite the best game of the year, but they were the first team to beat the Chiefs and that's worth something, and I'm pulling for Allen to win the MVP if Saquon doesn't.
It's still better than the alternative, though. In 35 years as a Pirates fan I've experienced exactly 6 playoff appearances (1990–1992, 2013–2015), one winning season where they didn't make the playoffs (2018), and a handful more that were worth paying attention to at some point (1997, 2003 (April only), 2005 (Early June only), 2011, 2012, 2016, 2023, 2024). The rest were all over before they even started. Yet I watched anyway, hoping something would happen, hoping they'd turn the corner. Prior to their 2013 playoff appearance I made a list of all the little things we'd suffered through as Pirates fans over the course of 20 losing seasons. I put together an all-time 20 years of losing commemorative team, full of players who personified 20 years of losing. I'm accused of my family of either being insincere or an idiot for continuing to pay attention. Mostly, though, no one cares. The Pirates continue to exist primarily as an inexpensive pro-sports option for families. Kids watch until they are old enough to understand that the team sucks and isn't worth watching.
Winning does not rectify this. Every time the team appears to be having a decent season, there's a loud chorus warning that the success is ephemeral; don't get used to it. During their string of winning seasons in 2013–2015, people still said that the best we could hope for was a few winning seasons per decade. Even if the team won the World Series, all we'd hear about is that it's a fluke, like the Marlins, and that Nutting would soon sell off the team, like the Marlins. Granted, Bob Nutting is part of the problem, but if the league were actually concerned about parity and had a structure akin to the NFL, there would at least be some incentive for him to try to have a winning team.
The thing about NFL rebuilds is that they're at least short enough that they're fun to watch in real time. Granted, as a Steelers fan my team will never rebuild (or at least never admit to it), but there was always a reason to watch. Will Mitch Trubisky perform better than geriatric Ben? Is Kenny Pickett the answer? How will Russ and Justin do? Will the defense be enough to compensate for an anemic offense? Elsewhere, no one expected the Commanders to turn it around as quickly as they did. No one expected the Bengals to do the same a few years earlier. The Patriots suck, but there's reason for optimism. I'd much rather have this than a league where every decade there are like 5 good teams, a few teams that will occasionally make the playoffs, and a hige raft of incompetents.
Look at the NFL in the '70s. The Steelers, Dolphins, Raiders, Cowboys, Vikings, Rams, and maybe Redskins were good. Then you had teams like the Colts, Broncos, Browns, and Oilers that were kind of good, sometimes. Then you had everyone else, who largely spent the decade in obscurity. the New York Giants did not make a single playoff appearance between 1964 and 1980. The Jets didn't make one between 1970 and 1980. The Patriots made 6 total playoff appearances (AFL included) between their inception in 1960 and the introduction of the salary cap in 1994. As I mentioned in my post below, the Steelers made the playoffs once in their first 40 years in the league.
A better example may be the NHL during the Dead Puck Era. You had New Jersey, Detroit, Colorado, Dallas, and maybe Philadelphia as legitimate cup contenders. The Sabres almost wone won but that was due to Hasek more than anything else. Even teams like the Penguins who consistently made the playoffs were never expected to do much. Look at the rosters and those teams were stacked. The other playoff regulars had a few stars but got thin quickly, and a bunch of teams had nobody. This is a big reason why Gary Bettman takes so much heat over expansion; everyone points to how long it took to get hockey going in the new markets, but most of the time those markets had very little to root for.
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Well, it's finally happened. The Steelers have a team that is winning. This may seem like a strange thing to say about a team that hasn't had a losing season in 20 years and has made the playoffs 3 seasons out of the last 5, but in a city where anything short of a Super Bowl appearance is considered a disappointment, saying you have a "winning team" mid-season doesn't mean so much that the wins outnumber the losses as it means that the team looks like they may actually contend for a championship. To understand how we got here, though, we need to recap Steelers History.
1933–1968: The Dark Ages
The team technically existed, but they were perennial losers. In their first 35 years of existence they had one playoff appearance that resulted in a 21–0 loss. Art Rooney would later achieve mythical status as the league's saint and one of the last surviving patriarchs from the early days, but for most of his time running the team he was seen as incompetent and cheap. "Same Old Steelers" was a common refrain, and Rooney had a habit of trading all his draft picks and prospects for washed up vets. Their level of success was comparable to that of the modern-day Browns. This was not a celebrated team.
1969–1971: Transition
Art Rooney cedes day-to-day operations of the team to his son, Dan, who immediately begins the only true rebuild in the team's history. Bill Austin is out at head coach and Chuck Noll is in. The rest of the team is slowly transitioned out in favor of new blood; the only pre-Noll players to have any serious roll in the team's future success were linebacker Andy Russell and center Ray Mansfield (Rocky Bleier was drafted in 1968 but didn't play much his rookie year and spent two years out of the league during which he was seriously injured in Vietnam, so I don't really count him as pre-Noll). 1970 saw the addition of Terry Bradshaw and Mel Blount. 1971 added Jack Ham, Dwight White, Ernie Holmes, and Mike Wagner. The team still sucked, but things were looking up.
1972–1979: The Steel Curtain Era
In 1972, the Steelers had their first winning season in a decade and made their first playoff appearance since 1947, where they slugged it out with the Raiders and lost the lead late. When it looked like all hope was lost, rookie Franco Harris missed his blocking assignment and ended up in perfect position to catch a deflected pass on a last-ditch play that had completely blown up, scoring a touchdown and handing the team their first playoff win ever. They would go on to win 4 Super Bowls in 6 years and cement themselves as the first dynasty of the modern NFL.
1980–1991: The Lost Years
Following a Super Bowl victory in January, hopes were high for the 1980 season. The team would end up finishing 9–7 and missing the playoffs for the first time since 1971. The following decade would see them win a couple division titles and even make a conference championship game, but the players from the dynasty era were beginning to retire, and they didn't do a great job of replacing them (the most notable blunder being passing on Dan Marino in 1983). Center Mike Webster, the last remaining player to win a Super Bowl with the team, would leave following the disastrous 1988 season. By this point the team was rudderless, and while they made the playoffs in 1989 due to a miraculous QB performance, it was from Bubby Brister. By 1991 the team seemed to have a good young core, but Noll knew he wasn't the man to lead them anymore.
1992–1996: Blitzburgh
Bill Cowher took over and immediately decided that offense didn't matter. Most defense-oriented coaches take a "ground and pound" approach but this usually assumes they have a good running back. The Steelers never had a true bell cow for most of that time but somehow managed to put up decent offensive numbers with Neil O'Donnell at QB, Yancey Thigpen as top WR, and RB by committee. The defense was consistently stifling. 1992 and 1993 were marked by routing playoff losses against good teams. In 1994 they should have gone to the Super Bowl but blew the AFC Championship game against an inferior Chargers team. In 1995 they would make the Super Bowl, but they were clearly outclassed by Dallas, O'Donnell's inexplicable interceptions notwithstanding. In 1996 they would change things up a bit by letting the Jets overpay O'Donnell and trading for Jerome Bettis (giving them a dynamite ground attack), but they'd end up getting blown out by New England during the mostly-forgotten Bledsoe era.
1997–2003: Kordell Stewart
Kordell Stewart was a second round pick in the 1995 draft whose athleticism allowed him to play as a QB/WR/RB/TE/KR/PR, giving him the nickname "Slash". Heading into 1997 without a quarterback, the decision was made to give Stewart the starting job. This was a bold move at the time, as it was before Michael Vick and Steve McNair legitimized the dual-threat quarterback. He led the team to the AFC Championship game his first season as starter, but he was mishandled by OCs who treated him like a pocket passer, and would be subject to repeated benching, booing, and rumors that he was gay. In 2001 he finally got an OC who knew what to do with him, and they returned to the playoffs and the AFC Championship, but a slow start in 2002 led to him being benched for the final time in favor of Tommy Maddox. Maddox was a feel-good comeback story of a guy who worked his way back into the league after playing arena football and being XFL MVP, and he led the team back to the playoffs, but the wheels came off in 2003, when they finished 6–10. They snatched up Ben Roethlisberger when he was unexpectedly available the following spring.
2004–2011: The Classic Ben Era
Ben was supposed spend a year learning from Tommy Maddox and Charlie Batch and ease into the lineup. Then Batch had surgery in August and was out for the season. Then, in the second game of the season, Maddox would blow out his elbow, forcing the rookie into the game. He'd lead the team to a 15–1 record and another AFC Championship game appearance that year, and win the Super Bowl the following season in what was supposed to be the Colts' year. They started 2006 with a hangover and finished the season 8–8, at which point Cowher bowed out. Mike Tomlin was then hired and took the team straight to the playoffs, then to another Super Bowl Championship. Following another disappointing hangoverish season, the team was back in the Super Bowl, though they lost this time. After losing in the first round of the playoffs to a Tebow-led Broncos team the following season, it was clear that an era had ended. Hines Ward, Troy Polomalu, Ryan Clark, and Ike Taylor were all past their prime, but a new crop of youngsters was on the way.
2012–2017: The Killer Bs
Ben, Brown, and Bell. This is the point where the team seemed to go off the rails. Steelers Football was traditionally smashmouth, 3 yards and a cloud of Bus, all-defense, and played by stand-up guys you could admire. Now it was high octane, left lane hammer down offense and questionable defense played by guys with huge egos and questionable character. They'd have a string of playoff appearances between 2014 and 2017, but it would result in few wins, and only one AFC Championship game appearance. It was largely considered a disappointment, but this is the last time the Steelers were supposed to be good. From here on out we'll take it year by year.
2018: Days of Our Steelers. Bell decides to hold out for the entire season to avoid playing on the franchise tag. The Steelers had made him a long-term offer, but he though the should be the highest paid running back in the league, and draw a double salary since he was also used quite a bit in the passing game. The holdout ended up wrecking his career. Toward the end of the season, Antonio Brown began exhibiting the bizarre behavior he's since become famous for when he was benched after getting into an argument with Ben. Meanwhile, the team had squandered a good start by blowing close games. Luckily, Ben showed veteran leadership by blaming everyone else on the team for poor play. They missed the playoffs due to a tiebreaker.
2019: Ben gets injured in Week 2 and everyone writes off the season. Mason Rudolph makes an admirable showing before he, too, is injured, and replaced by some guy named Duck Hodges who does good for a week before displaying why he was unemployed 2 weeks prior. Mason can't get it together and the season implodes.
2020: The Steelers get off to a hot start that absolutely nobody expects to last. They fade down the stretch and lose to Cleveland in embarrassing fashion in the first round of the playoffs.
2021: Ben decides he's too old to bend down and get under center and insists on playing out of shotgun while sitting on a stool in the backfield. the rest of the team is either too young to know what they're doing or too old to be able to do it anymore, and while they're able to get a few good wins and beat bad teams, they get smoked by anyone who's actually good. They sneak into the playoffs, but Mahomes and Company boat race them in the wild card round.
2022: The Steelers are rebuilding, but the Rooneys will never admit it. They pick up Mitch Trubisky to replace Ben in the short term and draft Kenny Pickett in the first round. After winning the first game in bizarre fashion, Trubisky is terrible and is benched in favor of Pickett, who performs better but not that much better. Still, bad Steeler football is better than most other teams when they're good, and they probably make the playoffs if Pickett isn't concussed and Trubisky doesn't throw numerous interceptions against the Tyler Huntley-led Ravens.
2023: Kenny Pickett is the starter going into the season. The entire year revolves around the Matt Canada controversy. Pickett and the offense play poorly overall but they still have a good record. The mantra is that if they had merely average quarterback production they'd be able to compete. Then Canada is fired, Pickett has a good game, and then is promptly injured. Trubisky plays horribly and is benched for Mason again, who plays well enough to convince some people that he's the solution and if only he'd been given a chance. Kenny Pickett recovers but they keep Mason in and he mopes about it. They make the playoffs and get smoked by the Bills, just as everyone expected they would.
That brings us to this year, when Justin Fields starts and gives us the average quarterback play that we've craved for so long. Some people think he earned the starting job and shouldn't be pulled whenever Russ is healthy. Then Russ comes in after six weeks and plays better than any quarterback since Ben. Mike Tomlin admits that the ability to make such bold moves is why he's highly compensated.
Do you think Russell Wilson is the solution for the Steelers at QB next year, or will they be on the hunt this off season for a new QB?
It was an open secret before the season even started that they'd be extending Wilson's contract if he had a good season, so barring any catastrophe, I'd expect something in the 2 year range.
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