If you looked skyward in Pittsburgh around 2:45 p.m. Monday, you saw a gorgeous double rainbow over the city.
I was heading to the North Side at the time, and I felt like I was driving right into it. Both arches appeared to end directly in Heinz Field’s parking lot.
Much like the Pittsburgh Steelers season, though, there was no pot of gold to be found on the North Shore.
For the second straight year, the Steelers blew a chance at the playoffs with a late-season slide.
This year, they lost three in a row to close the season and finish 8-8. Last year, they lost four of their last six games to finish 9-6-1. In both seasons, they were the last team to miss the postseason cut.
Over the next few days, you’ll hear a lot of fawning about the job that Mike Tomlin did to keep this team together when things looked bleak at 0-3 in the wake of Ben Roethlisberger’s season-ending elbow injury.
You’ll read a lot of love letters about how the club deserves applause for keeping 2019 interesting when the year could’ve come off the rails.
All those things are true.
Also true is the Steelers defined mediocrity. So let’s not work too hard to make more of this season that what it was.
All eight of their wins came against teams that missed the playoffs. Six of their eight defeats came against teams that qualified for the postseason.
They were better than most of the bad teams. They rarely outscored teams of any quality. The 9-7 Los Angeles Rams were the only team the Steelers beat that finished the year above .500.
So before we fully cast the 2019 Steelers as a black-and-gold-clad Sisyphus, pushing an NFL-sized boulder up Mt. Washington, let’s keep in mind they only made it halfway up the hill.
Thanks to NFL parity, the hill wasn’t as steep as we might want to portray it to be.
At the end of the analysis, the Steelers were 8-5 and in a playoff spot after 13 weeks of the regular season. They controlled their fate. Basically, they needed to beat the 7-9 Jets and many of Baltimore’s non-starters to make the playoffs.
Or win one of those games and muscle up to beat the Buffalo Bills at home in primetime.
They did none of those things.
I’ve often heard Steelers apologists say, “What if they started 5-8 against exactly the same schedule and wound up 8-8? What would you say then?”
Well, I’d say they were average and played a mediocre schedule. Much like I’m saying now.
I’d also wonder which winnable games against the Bengals, Browns, Dolphins, Cardinals or Colts they might have lost in that scenario to paint that picture.
Regardless, that’s not how it works. And if we are all being intellectually honest, we should admit that.
Any team that close to the playoffs should finish the job. Don’t create hypotheticals to make yourself feel better about an unfortunate result.
Especially because the “S.S. Tomlin” stayed afloat through the choppiest of seas early in the season, and the welcoming beaches of the playoffs were well within sight.
Until the offense careened into a reef off the shoreline.
