Tim Benz: More truth in a Mike Tomlin postgame quote than Steelers fans or organization may want to acknowledge

For as much as the national media loves it when Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin spins one of his famous Tomlinisms, I prefer the less-scripted stuff.

Not that I dislike “painting the red barn red” and “cutting your eyelids off if you blink” or “jumpin’ on a movin’ train.”

Yup. Those are classics.

But I tend to appreciate the rare moments when Tomlin is less calculated with the media. Less planned. The times when what he actually says is important and not just pithy phraseology.

Sunday night provided an example after his team’s 42-21 playoff loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. Tomlin was asked if the drop-happy wide receivers could’ve made a few more plays to help the passing game. “Ya’ think?” Tomlin replied, hiding zero sarcasm. And for good reason. They absolutely could’ve.

But perhaps in an instance of spontaneous transparency — with the emotions of a season-ending defeat still raw — Tomlin let slip a more pertinent, more big-picture admission about the state of his team. One the organization — and its fans — need to absorb.

“I tip my cap to those guys,” Tomlin said of the Chiefs. “If we want to carve out a niche in this thing, a push through the AFC, we’ve got to deal with the likes of that bunch.”

Tomlin is right. The Steelers don’t have a “niche” in the AFC. They are now playing catch up to the likes of the Chiefs. The Steelers are not keeping pace with Kansas City as they were through the first 11 weeks of 2020 when the two clubs were the top teams in the conference. Tomlin’s players are no longer fending off the Chiefs as they did when the Steelers managed to win at Arrowhead in the 2016 playoffs. Now Kansas City is a cut above what remains of Tomlin’s team. So much so that the coach is admitting the roster needs to rediscover a foothold in the base of the mountain where Patrick Mahomes and company reside with a penthouse view.

That “push through the AFC” that Tomlin mentioned? The Steelers haven’t done much of that since 2016. They’ve stopped on the cusp of the playoffs — or with a loss one game in — for five consecutive seasons.

That’s not a small historical marker. The Steelers have now completed five straight years of football without a playoff victory for the first time since 1972.

Once the Steelers got their first playoff win thanks to Franco Harris’ Immaculate Reception in December of that year, the organization has never gone more than four years in between playoff victories.

So, essentially, if you are under 50 years old, you really don’t know what a playoff-win drought of this length feels like.

Yes, I am still in that camp. Barely. But I slide in under the bar.

I’m not sure Steelers fans in Pittsburgh, or the organization itself, grasp the significance of that reality. Because when you look at the franchise’s current state of affairs, we need to realize that when Tomlin does twirl one of his favorite cliches, “the standard is the standard,” that standard has lowered. Significantly. The Steelers have become a team that has a high floor. That’s it.

A team you can count on to be in the playoff mix. But with nine of the past 11 seasons ending without a playoff win, those pushes through the AFC that Tomlin mentioned are now the exception rather than the rule.

Getting thumped in the way the Steelers did by the Chiefs on Sunday night should underscore the point. Maybe the lines of failure have been blurred by the fact that the Steelers have at least gotten to the playoffs in 2017, 2020 and 2021. And they were alive until the last weeks of 2018 and 2019.

But the margin of defeat in those playoff games was 135-100. Even that distasteful total is cosmetically closer than what the games really were.

If the historical frame of reference doesn’t resonate with you, consider how this season went. How much of an achievement was it really to qualify for the AFC playoffs?

As the seventh seed. At 9-7-1. Needing a win over the Baltimore Ravens without Lamar Jackson and most of its secondary, along with a stunning defeat from the Indianapolis Colts to get the last bid. Only to get throttled by the Chiefs for the second time in less than a month.

Did the Steelers genuinely overachieve that much with their late December push? Or did they just do what was needed to be done and get a little help? After all, their three late-season wins before and after the 26-point regular-season loss in Kansas City were against two division rivals that were circling the drain and an injury-addled Tennessee Titans team playing at a fraction of full strength.

I mean, no one would confuse me for a cockeyed Steelers optimist. And I picked Tomlin’s team to win all three of those eventual victories against the Titans, Browns and Ravens. So let’s not revise history and act like they made some Herculean charge to the postseason. They won games they needed to win and got help from the Raiders and Chargers barely avoiding a tie and a shocking upset by the worst team in football when the Jacksonville Jaguars surprised the Colts.

And let’s not confuse the emotion of Ben Roethlisberger’s farewell tour for his Hall of Fame quarterback play. Because Roethlisberger didn’t provide that. The offense was putrid pretty much all season long, in fact.

None of this is to say Steelers fans shouldn’t have enjoyed the end of this season, particularly the last month. Honoring Roethlisberger and slipping into the playoffs on that crazy final Sunday was fun. It is to suggest, however, that it’s important for them to soak up what Tomlin said in that quote above.

They aren’t the Chiefs. They have a long way to go to be like them. And, right now, Kansas City is the “standard” in the AFC. The Cincinnati Bengals are the “standard” in the North Division.

And the standard in Pittsburgh doesn’t appear to be what it was five years ago.