Steelers lack coaching and development...

I never said the culmination of his playoff career was top 5 ever, I was saying he was a Top-5 QB nearly every year in an era with the best QB play in NFL history. That part isn't up for argument, because it isn't really debatable without sounding dumb. They paid him hoping he could carry the team through to victory by himself and he couldn't. No shame in it. QB's even better than him shared the same fate. I disagree that we would be better off with a game manager. Only 3 QB's in the past 20 years have won a SB without being an elite QB or in the middle of their rise to being elite. Nick Foles (fluke back up win, likely never happens again), Joe Flacco (borderline top 10 in his prime, elevated the year he won - 11TD - 0 INT), Eli Manning (similar to Flacco, borderline top 10 guy - threw for 15TD's and 2 INT's in his 2 runs).

In the modern era of football the QB wins the SB, not the defense. It is very, very, rare that the defense is the driving factor, and the only way to win with a guy that is less than elite is to have the best defense in the league and get lucky that your average QB plays elite for 4 straight games. We very likely would have been in the same scenario, just with a different gripe if we didn't pay Ben. We paid Ben and decry not having the defense to win it all, or we'd let him leave and decry being behind the times with a QB that can't elevate and the game built for the offense to continually beat the defense. We were 100% better off paying Ben, we just didn't get rewarded for it.

It's a crap shoot in that you get the best QB you can and see if you can get it done. The Steelers gave up their "great" formula out of necessity, not to keep up with the Jones'. There is a reason why the Conference Championship Games go through Burrow, Mahomes, Hurts, Brady, Stafford, etc. every year. They are the best QB's. You can occasionally sneak a Goff or a Garroppolo in there, but those teams never win. You either have an elite QB or a guy that can be elite for short stretches when it matters, or you don't win. The era of game managers and defenses is over and it isn't coming back. If we are attempting to go back to this style we will be without a Super Bowl win until we correct our thinking.

It isn't a myth. Look at the teams that have won in the past 20 years and their QB's... You are correct in that its very hard for a QB to do it all on his own, there is an element of having a serviceable team around them to win, but without the QB your chances to win go straight to hell. QB play IS very mediocre in the league, this is why you are going to start to see the same teams in the Conference Championship Games every year. It's going to be the same 4-6 guys that go because they are the only 4-6 guys good enough to take their team there.

Our defense IS good enough to be a contender. We are still in a playoff spot with nearly the worst QB play in the entire league and we fired our OC mid-season. This is why I am so in favor of giving Cousins a shot. He is a borderline Top-10 QB that I would be willing to roll the dice for 2 seasons on him pulling off a 1200 yard 10TD 1INT playoff performance across 4 games to win it all. We don't have a top-5 guy, so we have to go with the ONLY other formula that has worked in the past 20 years. Good not great QB, hope he plays great in the postseason.

It is just as much blind speculation to assume we'd be worse off with another coach than it is to assume we'd be better off with Tomlin. If you look at the coaches that are actually successful right now, they are all offensive minds. Why is it that the Harbaughs, Tomlins, and McDermott's struggle to get it done in the post season while guys like Reid, Taylor, Shannahan continue to rack up the post season wins? It's 2 reasons. Offensive mind, better QB play. Allen has a shot with McDermott, but they are floundering. Dan Campbell has an opportunity to buck the trend, but McDaniel and Pederson are offensive minds that are starting to find some success too. We really need to assess whether or not Mike Tomlin has what it takes to hack it in the modern NFL. There aren't any true "players coaches" around the league that don't have the X's and O's acumen to do the job. Tomlin doesn't have that. The only way we can succeed (in my opinion of course) with Coach T is to surround him with the talented younger people with the high end X's and O's acumen that can lead the team tactically while he does what he does best (relate to and be respected by the players). It's not a knock that he can't do it by himself, its a knock that he either can't or refuses to surround himself with the proper people to succeed. It's not a weakness to acknowledge deficiencies and build around them, it is actually a strength if you can put the right people in place and delegate to people who has the strengths that you do not...

 

To sum everything up in a few words....

We are doomed

 

i definitely flew over the cuckoo’s nest!

 

TL;DR

 

Ok it’s mostly coaching and it ain’t getting better.

We’re watching ex-Steelers doing decently because the new coaches aren’t asking them to do things they aren’t good at for a play to work!

Just look at this dumb play on the first drive! Pat is out there chopping his feet for no damn reason! WTF is this offense?! DJ is running right into the zone defender! No wonder this team can’t score! This is in the scripted play phase! They planned on this and didn’t adjust!

https://x.com/mpfrazer/status/1732618899970007045?s=46&t=P_-hEpaXbxglXj3G7E5LGw

 

In football, it is a failure to evaluate.

 

The steelers ownership is cheap and does not pay a lot for assistant football coaches and has a head coach that has no branches of coaching tree because he runs everything. He tries to keep rookies on bench for first year and has a offense that is painful to watch because its so conservative. We can only win low scoring games where defense has to get two turnovers and play at the highest level in the league which is impossible every week with pro offense rules. We make idiotic undisciplined penalties, have zero control over knuckleheads like Johnson, and look unprepared at the beginning of games on both sides of the ball. If we lose to a team who is obvioulsy tanking tonight, we wont win another game this season.

 

Also, in a proper chain of command Danny Smith would have been fired a long time ago.

 

I bet a dime. Hit me

 

We are in the firing mode for sure.
Yes, there have been a number of special team muffs. That idiot that fielded the kick with a toe tap on the sidelines stands out in my mind...
I would agree with coaching.
I had Danny in Washington for a while... He got fired there after surviving too long.

 

lol ok... If you're having trouble, I can summarize into smaller words or smaller chunks?

Kind of a bad way to end a fruitful debate. It is what it is.

 

Yea if you could condense it and make your points a bit more succinctly I’d give an adequate response. It’s not the size of the words it’s the overly verbose word salads.

I did skim and I’ll say this. Ben wasn’t elite during any of the sb runs that he was part of. He was a game manager in those days. The ‘10 team even went 3-1 without him starting Batch and Dixon. Ben actually got outplayed by mark sanchez in that afc championship game in ‘10.

 

Not to mention Dan Fouts

 

Why did you have to bring that damn Jet game up. Yeah we won but it was yet another of my in the bag games.

 

Fair enough. I've read and written at a college level since I was like 10... Couple that with some pretty stout ADHD and I can be tough to communicate with via text sometimes. I apologize.

The point made was that the QB's that win are either elite, or on their way to being elite. Ben wasn't there yet in his first run, closer on his second, probably there on his 3rd and final appearance. Game managers don't win the big one, and when they do it is a guy that is borderline top 10 in the league that also has an incredible postseason. Flacco and Manning were good QB's that had incredible runs during their SB postseasons, and Foles is essentially a fluke back up that played elite for a 3 game postseason stretch. They threw like 32TD's to 3INT's and averaged nearly 280 YPG over 15 total games combined. That's really good.

There was an article today in which Ed Reed brought up Ben's name in a Brady vs. Manning debate unprompted. The guys that played against him view Ben in that light. Maybe not in the same company or same tier, but very close. That is why the "Ben wasn't elite" thing throws me off. It is a position held by very few and by no one with merit. Generally he is viewed as being underrated, not the other way around.

 

So P Manning wasn't a top 5 qb???? Because Ben , and His playoff stats are very very close??? Hell matter of fact who they Hell do you consider top 5...because I just looked at every single Qb I've ever thought was great, and not only is Ben's td- int almost the same as all of them, but better than a lot I looked up....outside of T. Brady????
Your hate of Ben is as ridiculous as the Tomlin hate.

 

Messages get old. The game changes. As do the players and culture etc… So on and so forth.

time for a new hat even if it don’t fit the first time out. Somethings gotta give round here and in my opinion the coaching top to bottom is a bigger problem than the old players and their execution of things mantra.

comfort a lot of the time leads to stagnation and that’s what we got and have had.