Tim Benz: Another offseason for the Steelers, more of the same old debates

As the Pittsburgh Steelers hit the 2024 offseason, it occurs like so many others in the recent past.

• The 2020 offseason followed an 8-8, non-playoff year with questions about how a surgically repaired elbow would impact Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback.

• The 2021 offseason followed a 12-4 year that ended with a double-digit home loss to Cleveland in the first round of the playoffs and with questions about how the Steelers could rework Roethlisberger’s contract to keep him at quarterback.

• The 2022 offseason followed a 9-7-1 year that ended with another double-digit loss in the first round of the playoffs in Kansas City and with questions about who would replace Roethlisberger at quarterback.

• The 2023 offseason followed a 9-8 year that ended without a playoff berth and with questions about whether Kenny Pickett could handle the starting job at quarterback.

Now, the 2024 offseason begins after a 10-7 campaign that ended with a double-digit loss in the first round of the playoffs in Buffalo and with questions about whether Pickett should really regain the job at starting quarterback.

The same old Steelers’ state of affairs. The same old Steelers debates.

Just one of which is how much credit coach Mike Tomlin deserves for leading the franchise to a 17th consecutive non-losing season or how much blame he deserves for failing to lead the franchise to a playoff win for a seventh consecutive season.

During an edition of “Get Up!” on ESPN last week, the full cast took the usual path that most national media types take. That’s to just gush over Tomlin’s career accomplishments, ignore the shortcomings of the past seven seasons and mock anyone in Pittsburgh who has the audacity to think that the Steelers should have accomplished more since the club last went to the Super Bowl 13 years ago.

Do you agree or disagree with the @GetUpESPN crew?#Steelers pic.twitter.com/XMjGtf7GwJ

— James Lawhorn Jr. (@TheMicDr) January 17, 2024

That was basically a greatest hits album of overused, low-hanging-fruit, Tomlin-defense cliches.

• If Tomlin leaves the Steelers, he’ll get another job in five minutes.

• If the Steelers let Tomlin leave, who will they get to replace him?

• Tomlin deserves all of the credit for anything good the Steelers do and none of the blame for things that went wrong because the QB situation is a mess, and Matt Canada was a bad offensive coordinator.

Of course, all of that ignores:

• That Tomlin getting a job elsewhere quickly (and presumably succeeding) means nothing in terms of whether it’s wise to keep him in Pittsburgh forever (see: “Reid, Andy” and “Eagles, Philadelphia”).

• That the Steelers managed to replace Chuck Noll with Bill Cowher and Cowher with Tomlin himself.

• That Tomlin is instrumental in roster construction, including the quarterback position, and that he hired Canada in 2020, promoted him in 2021 and retained him through the middle of this season.

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Credit the NFL Network’s Kyle Brandt for being one of the few national media members willing to take the other side of the argument surrounding Tomlin.

“They get to the playoffs and get their doors blown off,” Brandt said on “Good Morning Football” last week. “0-5 over the last five playoff games, and they just (got) destroyed. And if you look into it, they just get destroyed early. It’s almost like they don’t show up for it.”

Brandt wasn’t done.

“I know there’s a lot of people in the media who don’t want to cross Tomlin or love Tomlin, and I have no problem with Tomlin, but the whole thing about ‘we never have a losing season’ is getting old. Because you don’t, and then you go in the wild-card round and get destroyed. It’s enough,” Brandt continued.

Then Brandt also touched on what is at the center of frustrations for Steelers fans who are fed up with the national media bleating like sheep over Tomlin’s non-losing-season streak.

“A lot of teams would kill for it,” Brandt said. “The Raiders, the Chargers, the Browns, ‘We’re in the playoffs every year.’ You can’t come to me as the Steelers head coach and say, ‘Well, we’re in the playoffs. I never (had) a losing season.’ That’s not enough. You’re the standard. You’re probably the No. 1 standard for winning Super Bowls around the league, and it’s not even close.”

Especially when you use “The standard is the standard” as the unofficial team motto. That standard, now, is very standard.

Almost half of the league, 14 of 32 teams, make the playoffs. Nine teams finished with 11 wins or better. And almost a third of the league, 10 of 32 teams, finished with nine or 10 wins this year. So attaining nine wins isn’t all that hard to do in a league designed to make everyone .500.

To consistently be at .500 or above for 17 straight seasons is worthy of praise. To finish 11 of the past 13 seasons without a playoff victory is not.

We can debate forever whether the Steelers will be better off without Tomlin in the future. And we probably will have to do exactly that. Because once Tomlin gets his expected contract extension this offseason, that conversation will remain entirely hypothetical.

One thing that isn’t debatable, though, is that the Steelers have spent the past six seasons as a remarkably average team, winning between eight and 10 games in five of those seasons and all without a playoff victory.

ESPN’s personalities can mock people in Pittsburgh for demanding more than that low “standard” all they want. I’ll applaud those nationally and in town for calling them out on their uninformed, repetitive narrative.