What if McCarthy was the only option?

Yeah we passed on Lamar Jackson to take Terrell Edmonds.

 

Agree. This is a discussion board. No steelers related topic should be suppressed. Last i checked this is still America not the soviet union. And anyway we want to learn from our history so its not repeated.

 

The Patriots playing in a ****ty division certainly helped them gain all those #1 seeds as well. They had a very weak division while the Steelers division had 3 teams go to the playoffs several times. It's like running a gauntlet when your own division in that tough nearly every season. The Patriots got home field all the time, and were almost unbeatable at home.

The cheating they did will always be a real thing with me. When Goodell burned the evidence so the world would never see it or even the other owners would see it, that was all you needed to know about how bad it was and the advantages that it gave them. In my opinion, the Patriots should have been severely punished.....I mean extreme punishment. Like, field no team for a year and take away all their draft picks for a couple seasons severe. Like take the franchise off of them severe.

It still fries me when I think about that franchise and the crap they got away with. They won a bunch of Super Bowls while cheating and getting a couple slaps on the wrist for an offense that should have gotten them the sports equivalent of the death penalty.

 

What if we weren’t co-workers but co-people?

 

Agree. When you have to make a lot of changes after a winning HC tenure I think it makes a lot of sense to go with a guy that has a proven record in the league. MM might not be a great coach, but he's got built-in respect with his time as a HC. Imagine a brand new, young, unproven coach trying to make wholesale changes. I could see where that wouldn't go well for some vets.

 

It's fascinating that the Steelers had losing seasons a few years before 2003 but only had one chance at a 1st round QB. In 1999, they took a WR rather than Pennington. I think Cowher could have built a team around him.

Very hard to build a consistent winner with this guy as owner/GM:



whoops, sorry, I mean this guy;

 

I'd say that is a pretty safe bet. Here's what he was given as OC's
1. Bruce Arians who had plenty of NFL credibility but he left.
2. Todd Haley who had plenty of NFL credibility but they supposedly hated each other.
3. Randy Fichtner who no NFL credibility as OC, and it showed
4 Matt Canada who no NFL credibility as OC, and it showed

Let the excuses begin.

 

Your Jones pic made me think of this



Younger version...



And later in life...artist's rendering

 

Quite frankly, I am happy we did. I don't like his brand of QB play, but that's just me, and he can't win the big games.

 

I think there's no way we develop Lamar like Baltimore did. Especially since he would have been sitting behind Ben and you can't revamp your whole offense for a supremely athletic backup when your starter is getting to be pretty old.

I don't like Harbaugh, but I respect how he put his career on the line for Lamar. Which is a little ironic given how things seem to have ended over there.

 

It's certainly hard to win in today's AFC playoffs.

I think Lamar has only lost playoff games to Mahomes, Allen, and (maybe?) Burrows. Excluding maybe his first playoff trip.

I remember doing a post about this on another board. That before last year's playoffs (when I looked at it), Mahomes, Allen, Jackson, Burrows, and Stroud had only lost to each other in the playoffs after their first playoff appearance (e.g., I think Mahomes lost to Brady in his first playoff run).