BIG MISTAKE: As Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin found 3 malor players for the replacement of steelers QB..
The Pittsburgh Steelers might be making a devastating decision with their QB situation.
The Pittsburgh Steelers have a ton of uncertainty with their quarterback position, and that uncertainty might carry over into the 2024 NFL Season. In a recent appearance with the media, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin seems to have indicated the team’s QB situation for 2024:
Kenny Pickett will return as the QB1 in 2024, but the team will bring in some competition. Mason Rudolph looked the best of the Steelers’ passers this year, which is certainly saying something. Pickett was the team’s first-round pick back in 2022, and I truly wonder if the team would have drafted him if he did not go to Pitt for college.
It feels like the Steelers went for the feel-good story by drafting Pickett, as the second-year passer has been truly abysmal for the team. In 25 games for the team, he’s thrown 13 touchdowns against 13 interceptions and has earned a passer rating of 78.8. He’s completing just 62.6% of his passes and averages 179 passing yards per game.
He also turns 26 this year. I don’t think there is a single part of Pickett’s game that the Steelers can objectively look at and say that he can be a franchise passer, and it’s baffling that he is being brought back as the QB1. Third-string QB Mason Rudolph looked exponentially better for the Steelers this year, and the saying “If you have two quarterbacks, you don’t have any” applies here.
It’s hard to pick which of the three QBs for the Steelers is clearly the best between Pickett, Rudolph, and Mitchell Trubisky, who also played this year. I think Pickett and Rudolph would be decent backup options, but the Steelers are accepting mediocrity if they are giving Pickett a shot to be the QB1. Tomlin does note that they will bring in competition, which most likely means a free agent acquisition.
In my opinion, if the Steelers were serious about winning, they’d bring back Rudolph as a stopgap QB and look to the 2024 NFL Draft to potentially find their long-term answer. Hanging onto Pickett for the third year is only delaying the Steelers chances at making noise in the playoffs.
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Bills vs. Steelers: Buffalo eyeing a bigger stage than the Wild Card Round
The Buffalo Bills hold a firm lead against the Pittsburgh Steelers at halftime of Super Wild Card Weekend, it’s clear that Buffalo has much bigger sights than this game. Was anyone truly expecting the Pittsburgh Steelers to be competitive in this one? The Bills go into halftime with a 21-7 lead and are truly dominating in every facet of the game thus far.
Josh Allen has had a hand in all three touchdowns, throwing two of them and running for one. Playoff Josh Allen is alive and well, and I think at this point, the Bills are fine. It’s hard to envision Mason Rudolph and the Steelers offense putting up many more points. In fact, the Steelers touchdown was thanks to a blocked field goal, so they had a short field.
Mason Rudolph has gone 8/16 for 102 yards, one touchdown, and one interception. Josh Allen has gone 15/21 for 146 yards and two touchdowns. It’s clear that the Bills are putting a ton on Allen’s plate, as he’s also added 58 rushing yards and another score as well. In the second half, I think we see more of the same from the Bills.
And at some point, the game might get so out of hand that the Bills could pull some of their starters to begin resting for the Divisional Round. If Buffalo wins, they would host the Kansas City Chiefs in the next round, and that would be the first away playoff game of Patrick Mahomes’ career. Can the Buffalo Bills hold on in the second half?
If so, you’d then be looking at the Texans traveling to Baltimore to face the No. 1 seeded Ravens. The final four teams with a Bills’ win would be the Bills, Chiefs, Ravens, and Texans.
The first domino in this offseason’s major coaching re-shuffle fell on Thursday, and it was the objectively the most hilarious domino possible. When Bill Belichick and the Patriots agree to ‘mutually part ways,’ a lot of people pointed to the Cowboys as a team that would make sense for him. They had a playoff-caliber core, a great defense, and were seemingly just a … wiser? … coach away from being about as complete a team as the NFL has. And then, when the Cowboys got boat-raced by the Packers in their own stadium, that speculation grew. Surely there was no way that Jerry Jones would retain Mike McCarthy, right? Well, reader, that’s where you’re wrong. Because if you can believe it, Jerry Jones decided to keep a coach who clearly wasn’t going to workout longer than he needed to:
After “losing home playoff game to inferior opponent,” this is probably the most Cowboys thing possible. But hey, maybe it’ll work next year. What this means for Belichick is that he can probably start taking his Atlanta Zillow searches a little more seriously. It seems like he’s destined for the Falcons, especially with Thursday’s news that he’d be interviewing with the team for a second time today:
Besides the fact that it’s funny to learn that even *Bill Belichick* has to go through multiple rounds of interviews to land a job, this seems pretty set in stone. A 1-on-1 meeting with ownership is way less about your credentials and more about your terms of employment. If the league’s in-house reporter is saying that “things are ramping up,” that just means that no one can say anything official yet because they’re behind on paperwork. So, yeah, the Cowboys missed out on Bill Belichick. But it’s fine, they have Mike McCarthy!
News recently broke that Dallas Cowboys head coach Mike McCarthy would return for the 2024 NFL Season. This is a truly baffling decision. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That applies to every avenue of life, including sports. After three-straight years of winning 12 games in the regular season and showing poor playoff performances, the Cowboys are somehow still sticking with Mike McCarthy in 2024.
The Cowboys have not advanced past the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs since the mid-90s, before some of you were even born, including myself. Every year that the Cowboys make the postseason, the jokes start about how they won’t do well, and that was the case this year, as the upstart Green Bay Packers walked into Jerry World and dismantled the talented Cowboys.
And after yet another disappointing postseason exit in the Mike McCarthy tenure, Jerry Jones is still going to bring him back in 2024. When you look at McCarthy as a regular season head coach, he boasts a very strong record. He’s gone 42-25 in the regular season with the Cowboys, which is one of the best records in the NFL over the last four seasons. Heck, he is average 10.5 wins per season.
However, the Cowboys are 1-3 in the postseason under McCarthy, clearing hitting a ceiling when the playoffs begin. And each year, their exit from the postseason is the same type of ugly, disappointing performance. In the NFL, teams will not win Super Bowls without taking HUGE risks to some degree.
There are a ton of examples of this in recent memory. The Buffalo Bills made it to the postseason in 2017 with Tyrod Taylor as the starting QB. They rightly recognized that Taylor was not going to lead them to a Super Bowl, so they took a risk in drafting Josh Allen in 2018. The Kansas City Chiefs went 50-26 during the Alex Smith era, but it became clear that Smith was not quite good enough to lead KC to a Super Bowl, so they moved on from him for Patrick Mahomes.
The Denver Broncos went 46-18 when John Fox was their head coach during the 2012-2014 seasons. However, a 3-4 playoff record was simply not good enough, so they moved on from Fox and won a Super Bowl in the next season with Gary Kubiak as the head coach. The Dallas Cowboys have clearly hit a ceiling with their own head coach, and bringing him back for yet another season is truly insane.
And this is especially true when you look at guys like Mike Vrabel and Bill Belichick being free agents. Both Vrabel and Belichick would have been upgrades over McCarthy and have shown, in their own ways, the ability to win tough games with their respective rosters. I think if Jerry Jones was serious about winning, he would have parted ways with McCarthy and shot for the moon for a potential upgrade at head coach.
