Tim Benz: Loss to Bears puts Steelers' non-losing season streak in danger

Whatever the 21-year stretch of never having a losing season means to coach Mike Tomlin, owner Art Rooney II and anyone else in the Steelers organization, they better understand how much Sunday’s defeat in Chicago has put it in peril.

Linebacker T.J.Watt seems to have a grasp of that.

“The margin for error is slim,” Watt said of the his team’s recent struggles after the 31-28 defeat. “We have a lot of things to fix quickly. We need to be playing our best football at this stretch of the season. We need to get better and get better quick.”

Watt is more accurate than anyone at Steelers headquarters may want to admit.

The Steelers are 6-5 with six games remaining. Those six games are at home against the Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins and Baltimore Ravens. They also visit the Ravens, Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns.

The path to “8-9 or worse” is just as easy to see as the path to “9-8 or better.”

The easiest thing to say is that the Steelers will beat the Dolphins (4-7) and Browns (3-8), and they’ll split with the Ravens. That gets you to at least 9-8, and the streak will be extended.

What that probably doesn’t get is a playoff bid, but we’ll worry about that later.

“We’ve got a lot of great leaders in the locker room on both sides, and I know we’ve got the right stuff to steady the ship and bounce back next week,” quarterback Mason Rudolph said.

Maybe. You could argue that next week’s opponent, the Bills, are struggling, having lost two of three. At 7-4, they aren’t what they have been in recent years. Many are saying that the Bills at this point are Josh Allen, James Cook and not much else.

I can’t argue with that. However, they are already 4 ½-point favorites at Acrisure Stadium for Sunday’s game.

I can’t argue with that either.

The last time the Steelers beat the Bills in Pittsburgh was 2013, and E.J. Manuel was the Buffalo quarterback, not Allen. In fact, the Steelers are just 1-4 against Allen since he came into the NFL.

Not to mention, the Bills will be coming off extended rest, since they last played on Thursday night when they lost 23-19 in Houston.

Furthermore, that Miami game is a “Monday Night Football” broadcast on Dec. 15 at Acrisure Stadium. The Steelers have lost all three of their prime-time games this year against the Chargers, Packers and even the 3-8 Cincinnati Bengals.

Plus, as bad as the Browns may be, the Steelers have won just once in their last seven trips to Northeast Ohio. That includes a tie against Tyrod Taylor and losses to Jacoby Brissett, Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Jameis Winston.

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Say what you will about current Cleveland quarterback Shedeur Sanders, it’s at least fair to say he’ll probably be better than a few of those guys.

The point is, you don’t have to squint very hard to see how 2-4 the rest of the way may be possible. That would wrap up the 2025 season at 8-9 and end the streak.

After all, the Steelers have just concluded a six-game stretch where they went 2-4. Meanwhile, the Ravens have won five in a row, so let’s not consider a split between the two teams a lock either. At this point, if either game in the series was slated for this weekend, my guess is that the Steelers would be underdogs in Pittsburgh or Baltimore.

“We’ve got good coaches. We’ve got good players. We just have to win games,” linebacker Nick Herbig said via  Steelers.com. “Regardless of what goes on throughout the week. Regardless of who is playing, who isn’t playing. At the end of the day, we’ve got to win.”

To me, 9-8 or 10-7 and missing the playoffs is the same thing as finishing 8-9 or 7-10. I’ve been singing that same song about this phony-baloney, fluffed-up streak since the Steelers lost that playoff game to Jacksonville at the end of the 2017-18 season.

That was the defeat that started the much more significant current streak in Pittsburgh — eight years without a playoff win.

LISTEN: Tim Benz and Mark Madden discuss the Steelers loss in Chicago.