It’s that time of year again. With the NFL offseason upon us, it’s time to make needless predictions for next season without the NFL Draft, free agency, or any offseason workouts underway. And ESPN’s Dan Graziano came out with the most predictable take of all — the Pittsburgh Steelers will miss the playoffs in 2026.
Every offseason, a host of analysts and media personalities come out with their big, bold prediction that the Steelers, who haven’t had a losing season since 2003, will have a losing season the upcoming year. Of course, this is now a Steelers team that doesn’t have Mike Tomlin at the helm and has a question mark at quarterback to go along with an aging core. It’s really not that hard to see the Steelers having a losing season in 2026, yet, it hasn’t happened in so long it’s worthy of a “big prediction.”
“The Steelers will have their first losing season since 2003,” Graziano wrote. “For a few years now, this roster has needed a more extensive rebuild than the team has been willing to undergo. For all the issues Steelers fans had with Mike Tomlin by the end of his tenure, there’s a good chance 2026 shows that he was actually holding things together in Pittsburgh.”
My only gripe with this take is that we have no idea how the offseason is going to go. We’re three days removed from the Super Bowl. There’s still so much roster building to undergo that making predictions for what’s going to happen next season is rather fruitless. Yes, as it stands right now, the Steelers’ roster is shaky and losing Tomlin hurts. But Mike McCarthy has won recently, and with a good enough roster, he could certainly coach the Steelers to a winning season.
But we don’t know what that roster is going to be. Will Kenneth Gainwell stay or leave in free agency? Will the Steelers make a big splash, potentially signing a Malik Willis or adding someone like Rico Dowdle? Could they potentially make an even bigger splash? We don’t know! Maybe the Steelers trade up in the draft for a receiver or, dare I say, a quarterback. There’s too much unknown to predict that the team will have a losing season. Yes, they lost Tomlin, who never had a losing season. But it feels way too easy to say that because Tomlin’s gone, the Steelers will be below .500.
And even with Tomlin the last few years, it was trendy to pick the Steelers to underachieve and finish below .500. But without fail, they found themselves getting their butt kicked in the Wild Card Round instead.