Steelers' 22-Year Respectability Streak Becomes Their Undoing

It became a tired trope by the end: the Steelers haven't finished below .500 since 2003, and Mike Tomlin never had a losing season in 19 years as coach. In a league designed for parity, that's a stupid level of consistency.

By the end, though, the streak had lost most of its meaning. A fanbase spoiled by six Lombardi trophies was tired of settling for "just better than average" season after season, even if Tomlin's ability to squeeze winning records out of teams that often had no business winning more than they lost remained impressive.

The reality was this: Pittsburgh hadn't won a playoff game since the 2016 season, and another eight- or nine-win season wasn't proof the Steelers were still close to contention. It was starting to look like proof that they were stuck.

The Week 3 win over Cincinnati bought Pittsburgh a week of false hope, but Thursday night in Cleveland offered a sobering reminder of exactly where this team is. The Steelers followed their best performance of the season with a mostly lifeless, predictable one — at least if you've been paying attention.

And let's be real: this is who Pittsburgh is. Good enough to steal a few games every year, but not a team you're taking seriously in January. And if you're willing to accept that premise, then there is another way to look at that 22-year streak: What if the losing season the Steelers have spent all this time avoiding is exactly what this franchise needs?

That doesn't mean anyone at the facility should be trying to lose games. Players and coaches don't operate that way, and losing by itself guarantees nothing. Plenty of bad teams stay bad for years.

The larger question is what Pittsburgh should do if it discovers, again, that this team isn't good enough to seriously contend. Is squeezing eight or nine wins out of another season really preferable to finally accepting reality?

Because Pittsburgh has confused avoiding the bottom with remaining near the top. These are not the same thing.

Everybody gets bad. Except Pittsburgh.

Start with the 2025 playoff field. Every other playoff team had posted a losing season within the previous seven seasons. Pittsburgh's last losing season came more than two decades ago.

2025 playoff team

Most recent losing season

Panthers

2025

Patriots

2024

Jaguars

2024

Bears

2024

49ers

2024

Broncos

2023

Chargers

2023

Texans

2022

Rams

2022

Packers

2022

Seahawks

2021

Eagles

2020

Bills

2018

Steelers

2003

For years, Pittsburgh's ability to avoid that one down season was a feature, not a bug. The Steelers were winning division titles, making deep playoff runs and competing for Super Bowls with Ben Roethlisberger, the franchise quarterback they drafted in the first round back in 2004. The same Big Ben they drafted, incidentally, after going 6-10 in 2003.

That's not where they are anymore. It's been a decade since Pittsburgh last won a playoff game, and lately the streak has looked less like proof that the Steelers are still among the NFL's best organizations and more like evidence that they've become extremely good at being slightly better than mediocre.

And the middle comes at a cost.

Going down doesn't mean staying down

I went back through every season since 2002 and looked at teams that had a losing season, only to later reach a conference championship game before having another losing season. There were 47 such instances.

When teams break through as legitimate contenders, a losing season is often only a year or two in the rearview. In 70% of those cases, the team reached a conference championship within two seasons. Nearly 90% did it within three.

Of 47 teams that went from a losing season to a conference title game ...

How long did it take to get there?

Within 1 year

18 of 47 (38%)

Within 2 years

33 of 47 (70%)

Within 3 years

42 of 47 (89%)

Within 4 years

45 of 47 (96%)

Of the 47 teams that made that jump, 33 reached a conference championship within two seasons, and 42 did it within three.

Recent examples aren't hard to find. Cincinnati went 4-11-1 in 2020 and reached the Super Bowl the next season. Washington went 4-13 in 2023 and reached the NFC Championship Game a year later. Detroit went 3-13-1 in 2021 and was playing for a Super Bowl trip two years later.

Philadelphia went from 4-11-1 in 2020 to the Super Bowl two years later. San Francisco went 4-12 in 2018 and reached the Super Bowl the following season.

None of that means a losing season guarantees a turnaround. But it does push back on the idea that one bad season means signing up for a half-decade rebuild. Among the teams that successfully reset, the average time from a losing season to a conference championship was just two years.

The hidden price of always being respectable

The Steelers know all about the downside of never falling very far in the standings. From 2007-25, their average first-round draft position was around 22nd overall, and they picked in the 20s or later 13 times. The reality is that they just haven't been bad enough to have a real shot at a franchise quarterback.

The only quarterback taken in Round 1 in post-Big Ben Pittsburgh? Kenny Pickett, the 20th pick in 2022. So … yeah. But that's the hidden cost of the streak: drafting in the 20s instead of top-5 makes finding a franchise quarterback close to impossible.

It doesn't mean picking near the top of the draft guarantees another Roethlisberger. But it does mean Pittsburgh has spent most of the last two decades without even having access to that part of the draft.

This is a logical time to reset

The 2026 roster changes the timing, too. Pittsburgh entered the season as one of the oldest teams in the NFL and the oldest in the AFC, with a 42-year-old starting quarterback.

Put another way: it's all coming to a head, likely very soon. Rodgers is on a one-year deal, several other contracts come up after the season, and veterans like Cam Heyward have made it clear they're much closer to the end than the beginning.

There are reasons to be excited about the future, which means Pittsburgh doesn't have to tear this thing down to the studs. Nick Herbig and Keeanu Benton, Troy Fautanu, Zach Frazier and Mason McCormick give Pittsburgh young pieces on both sides of the ball. The team can spend 2027 building around that young core instead of patching the current roster with more short-term fixes.

That's the difference between tanking and recognizing where a team actually is. If the record in December confirms what we all witnessed over the first month, spending future assets or prioritizing veterans simply to protect another non-losing campaign accomplishes more harm than good.

The last time Pittsburgh bottomed out

The irony is that the best argument for what a losing season could do for Pittsburgh comes from the Steelers themselves. To revisit what I wrote above: Pittsburgh's last losing season came in 2003, when it went 6-10. That gave the Steelers the 11th pick in the 2004 NFL Draft, the highest natural first-round selection they've had in the past two decades.

They used it on Ben Roethlisberger. Pittsburgh went 15-1 and reached the AFC Championship Game his rookie season, then won the Super Bowl a year later.

No one should expect history to neatly repeat itself. First, teams don't know they have a franchise quarterback until years after drafting him. Second, there is no paint-by-numbers process that turns six wins into a Lombardi Trophy two years later.

But there is also nothing sacred about nine wins if nine wins lead right back to the same place. The Steelers have spent 22 years proving they can avoid the bottom, even as the rest of the league's contenders have routinely gone through losing seasons, reset their rosters and found their way back.

Maybe the danger isn't finally having one bad year. Maybe it's spending another decade trying so hard to avoid one that Pittsburgh never gives itself the chance to become something more than respectable again.

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_Originally reported by [CBS Sports](https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/steelers-losing-season-2026-mike-tomlin-mike-mccarthy/)._