I wonder if a young Ben Roethlisberger would have been traded away by Tomlin and Khan???

Thanks for the correction on Faneca!

In my head, I think I always connect him and Dawson for some reason. I think when I made the list, I wrote Faneca the first time (instead of Dawson). Then I though "I didn't put Dirt on this list".

It's like how I will often flip 6s and 8s. It's my stupid human brain!

I'll go back and edit the previous post.

 

From 2001 to 2009,at least one team who had make the super bowl the year before missed the playoffs the year after...So it was nothing new at that time

 

I think there are two (maybe three?) main things that kept us away from another SB win. Especially post-GB loss where we didn't have much playoff success.

1. Ben (deservedly) kept taking up more and more cap%. This meant that we couldn't put as good a team around him. This (1) made the offense more dependent on him than early in his career and (2) made it harder to spend on offense and defense. This meant having Ben throw a lot more. And Ben was a high variance player. And unfortunately "bad Ben" showed up in the playoffs way more than we would have liked post GB SB. I think this was amplified by the advent of the rookie wage cap which meant that other teams with average to above average young QBs got a massive cap advantage. It's too bad that we didn't get to see the Steelers with this advantage on Ben's rookie deal (pre-rookie cap). Imagine if we could have had an extra elite player's worth of salary to spend in Ben's first 4 years. Technically, the Pats didn't get the rookie wage cap advantage with Brady. But because he was drafted so late, they might as well have. Like us, the Colts also got screwed by not having this with Manning.
2. The Shazier injury was crushing. Not just on a human level. Becuase of (1) above Shazier basically was the defense (and Cam). I don't think he would have won a DPOY (really hard to do at ILB, which had become devalued IMO), but I think we would have been in the conversation for a while. So we would have had Shazier in his prime when Watt was ascending. And that would have happened when the O was still good. Instead, the O and D were "out of phase" in the BBB era. When the O was very good, the D wasn't. Then, after we spent a bunch of high value draft capital to build the D back up, the O declined. If Shazier doesn't get hurt, then the O and D are closer to their peak performance at the same time. It's hard to win in the playoffs when you're a one-sided team IMO.
3. The AFC probably had 3 of the 4 best QBs in the league every year of Ben's career. Early it was Ben, Brady, and Manning. Manning retires after 2015. Mahomes is drafted in 2017.

There probably is some coaching effect to how we seemed to **** the bed every time in the playoffs since Ben's injury. But I think the CLE game is just horrendous player execution. And after that, we were just playing teams that were much much better than us with a team that probably shouldn't have been in the playoffs.

But I don't think we can point to any of the playoff losses and say that coaching was the biggest issue. I think most of the losses are about point (1) above. Ben was the biggest reason we won in the playoffs. And the biggest reason we lost in the playoffs. He was the Brett Favre of his generation (but Ben was better than Favre...which is a very high bar).