Tim Benz: Applying the 'snow globe' theory to the 2024-25 Steelers

Maybe it’s because I watched too many Christmas movies over the past week, but I find myself scrutinizing the 2024-25 Steelers season and wondering what it would look like if I put it in a snow globe and shook it up.

How much nicer would it look if those wins and losses all fell in a different way?

Instead of losing three games in a row to their toughest competition leading right up to Christmas, what if those results had been spread out a bit?

For instance, what if that loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was flip-flopped with the loss to the Indianapolis Colts in Week 4? What if the loss to the Baltimore Ravens had occurred in Week 8? What if that loss to the Kansas City Chiefs took place Dec. 1 instead of Christmas Day as a third consecutive defeat over an 11-day span?

We’re probably feeling a lot better about the team, aren’t we?

Unfortunately, that compact three-game losing streak has made us feel a lot worse about the state of this year’s team and the overall course of the franchise than what three non-consecutive, mid-season losses to top-shelf competition would have.

Similarly, the 10-3 start raised our eye level of this year’s club to an illogical extent.

Yeah, it’s all a matter of perspective, I guess.

There is one thing I absolutely know. Let’s say on Aug. 1, I had guaranteed you that after 16 games, the Steelers would be 10-6. Their division hopes will still be alive. They’ll have a playoff spot sewn up. Would you have accepted that promise and taken your chances from there?

I bet 100 out of 100 Steelers fans would have signed in blood for that deal.

They would have because that eventuality is exactly how most people in Pittsburgh thought this season would go for the local football team. The belief was that they’d be a slightly better version of what they had been the year before because Russell Wilson was the quarterback, the defense made some additions, and they had an offensive coordinator whose name wasn’t Matt Canada.

That’s not reality, though.

As is the case with a lot of other things in life, perception is often reality in the NFL. And the reality of that three-game losing streak is that it illustrated another presumption about the Steelers coming into the 2024-25 campaign: They were still at least one notch below the best competition in the league.

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They don’t deserve to be talked about in the same breath as some other, more obvious Super Bowl contenders.

At 10-3, opinions changed. Now, after losing by a combined score of 90-40 to three division leaders over the past three games, those opinions have reverted back to where they were all summer.

None of this is an attempt by me to blame the NFL schedule makers. I’m not doing that.

After all, the Chiefs and Ravens dealt with three games in 11 days just fine. Part of their handling of that task was how both of those teams ran roughshod over the Steelers.

I’m also not trying to make you feel better about the Steelers’ chances to beat the Cincinnati Bengals on Saturday night or their potential playoff fate.

That game against the Bengals is a coin flip, and if the Steelers have to play the likes of Baltimore, K.C. or the Buffalo Bills at any point in the playoffs, they’ll probably get stomped.

I’m just pointing out that maybe 2024-25 isn’t the “tale of two seasons” that a lot of people are making it out to be. This is exactly the season we should’ve been anticipating from these Steelers since training camp opened at Saint Vincent College in August.

And it’s pretty much the same season we’ve come to expect for the past eight years.

Listen: Tim Benz and Mike Petraglia of WLW radio and “The Jungle Roars” podcast joins me to preview Steelers vs. Bengals on Saturday night