3Rivers’ Takeaways: Looking back at early predictions as Steelers exit bye week
Christina Rivers (3Rivers_Writer on Twitter) offers her Pittsburgh Steelers post-game takeaways, both positive and negative, as Steel City Underground extends its coverage of the Steelers’ on-field performances throughout the 2021-22 NFL regular season.
Before the 2021 NFL regular season kicked off, I did a week-by-week prediction of how the Pittsburgh Steelers (3-3) would fare. As the Steelers exit their bye week and prepare to face AFC North rival Cleveland Browns (4-3), I’ll look back at those early predictions and examine how the pairings between the Steelers and their opponents actually went.
Weeks 1-3
I had predicted that the Steelers had a 50/50 shot at beating the Buffalo Bills, that they’d be able to handle the Las Vegas Raiders, and that there were enough question marks surrounding the Cincinnati Bengals that Pittsburgh should handle that AFC North rival.
The Steelers did, indeed, beat the Buffalo Bills (4-2) who are in year four of a rebuild and are sitting at the top of the AFC East, just one game ahead of the New England Patriots. The Bills have been, at times, explosive offensively but they haven’t played flawless football. Buffalo faced the Miami Dolphins (1-6), Washington Football Team (2-5), and Houston Texans (1-6) before meeting any real competition other than Pittsburgh when they beat the Kansas City Chiefs (3-4) and then lost to the Tennessee Titans (5-2).
Week One for the Steelers may have been the best they played before the bye week, except for a markedly improved game against the Seattle Seahawks in Week 6.
Las Vegas came out swinging this year and the Raiders currently own the top spot in the AFC West. After a success over Pittsburgh, the Raiders faced the Dolphins and won by just a field goal, went head-to-head with the Los Angeles Chargers (4-2) and lost, failed to stop the Chicago Bears (3-4), got back on track with a win over the Denver Broncos (3-4) and another over the Philadelphia Eagles (2-5).
I’m not saying that it was a fluke that the Raiders beat the Steelers, but Pittsburgh had almost no identity on offense after Week 1 and the teams that Las Vegas has beaten since have not had stellar performances. Yes, they won, and many fans and analysts will say that is all that matters when it comes to the game between the Raiders and Steelers. We’ll have to see how the two teams fare through the remainder of the season before we put either of them into playoff brackets.
The game I was most disappointed with, as far as how the Steelers performed, was Week 3’s loss to the Bengals (5-2). As it turns out, Cincinnati has been doing very well and currently leads the AFC North. They lost to the Bears before facing Pittsburgh, so I thought my prediction may have been spot-on; it turns out that the Bengals were warming up.
They’ve played close games against the Jacksonville Jaguars (1-5) and Green Bay Packers (6-1), before blowing out the Detroit Lions (0-7) and Baltimore Ravens (5-2). Joe Burrow has been doing a nice job at quarterback now that he’s healthy.
As far as predictions go, I didn’t do so hot with the first three weeks of predictions. I think, mainly, that it was due to the fact that the Raiders and Bengals looked decent on paper but had not initially appeared as competitive against the Steelers’ defense. When injuries occurred, however, to key players on the Steelers’ defense, and the offense performing so inconsistently, it became clear that there was a shift on who would be the more dominant teams.
Weeks 4-6
I had made this exact statement regarding Week 4 between the Steelers and Packers:
Early prediction: Steelers 60/40 win if Rodgers is gone; 50/50 if he stays.
It turned out that Aaron Rodgers did remain in Green Bay and he had some gamesmanship in the matchup with Pittsburgh. I really felt that the NFC North would be a miserable division this season, especially if Rodgers was not in the green and gold. As it turns out, the Packers are the only team in that division to have a winning record, unless you count .500 (Minnesota Vikings, 3-3) as a win.
The Steelers were outmatched in the contest and still had not determined how to set up their offense for success. Outside of rookie running back Najee Harris, the remainder of the offense for Pittsburgh was a bit of a trial and error situation. The defense, missing other key players, were working Tre Norwood and Justin Layne into the backfield, and Rodgers, being the wily vet that he is, took advantage of miscues and inabilities of Keith Butler to make necessary adjustments.
My Week 5 prediction was that the Steelers would win the battle with the Broncos in a defensive duel. I wasn’t wrong. Injuries were an issue for Denver in 2020, and they haven’t helped the team this season, either. Teddy Bridgewater has struggled as the Broncos’ quarterback and their defense has been taken advantage of early in the season. With a 3-4 win-loss record, the Broncos aren’t out of contention, and they did give the Steelers a run for their money. The Steelers’ defense just took too much away from the Broncos and won as a result.
My early prediction for Week 6 was that the game between the Steelers and Seattle Seahawks (2-4) would be a 50/50 shoot-out thanks to Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson. Instead, Wilson injured a finger on his throwing hand that forced him onto injured/reserved and put Geno Smith in as the signal-caller. It was a rather close game, and officiating at the end of regulation forced the two teams to play an overtime period. If it hadn’t been for two key sacks by T.J. Watt as the night went long, the Steelers might have lost that game.
