When the Pittsburgh Steelers are in the dreaded long offseason, there are plenty of ideas to debate. As part of the triumphant trio on the Steelers Preview podcast, I’ve been known to often give a “Dave answer“ to various things as I often like to argue both sides of an issue. With this in mind, a new weekly segment was born… Unpopular Opinion.

There are plenty of arguments both for and against the Pittsburgh Steelers that might not go along with the narratives floating around. Oftentimes I believe in these arguments, while other times I simply like to pose a counter argument for ones that are taking it too much to the extreme. For this reason, I’m going to offer some points about the Pittsburgh Steelers that go against the general fan narrative, or at least how I have heard things.

Next up is popular plan to dissect, but should not be followed completely…

The Steelers shouldn’t follow anybody else’s Super Bowl blueprint

I’m sure Steelers fans have seen it everywhere this week. Now that the NFL has crowned a new champion for the 2025 season, it’s all about breaking down what that team did to succeed and win the Lombardi trophy. It’s discovering their blueprint and copying it in order to be the next championship team.

I get the idea behind it. I definitely think it’s important to break it down and see what these teams did to have success in championships. But this just happened to be the one team whose blueprint worked this time. Is it guaranteed to work again?

I argue the fact that if the playoffs had to be replayed starting next weekend, I don’t even think it would be the same two teams that reach the Super Bowl. The way the NFL postseason is set up, it’s all about performing at a high enough level to beat the opponent that happens to be on the field that given day in order to move on. Most likely, if two teams could play five times it would be rare that the same team would win all five games. So the fact that the Seattle Seahawks made their way through the postseason gauntlet to win the Super Bowl doesn’t mean that they could even implement their blueprint again with the exact same players two weeks later, let alone somebody else trying to copy and do the same thing.

Blueprints change. There were 32 teams who started with a blueprint at the beginning of the season, and I would guarantee that all 32 had their blueprint change by the end of the year. Some had big changes while others were small. But that’s the nature of the NFL. Between injuries, players under-performing, or adjusting for players who were over-performing, the planes change.

Even from year-to-year the overall trends can change. I remember four or five years ago being scolded about the Steelers trying to have their defense be the strength of their team and how that simply won’t work in today’s NFL. I was told it was all about the offense, especially when the league’s top offense in the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl following the 2022 season. But after that season, including the Chiefs themselves, it’s been a complete changeover. The last three Super Bowl champions all were teams that ranked higher defensively than offensively. Does that mean that will always work? No. But it also means that saying it won’t work has been disproven.

The bottom line is, the Steelers need to determine their own blueprint for success for 2026. If they simply try to copy what somebody else is doing, they’re going to come up short. They don’t have the players, coaches, or injury fortune to guarantee anything.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Steelers shouldn’t be stealing from all the other teams in the NFL to determine their blueprint. Still, I wouldn’t even take half of what the Seahawks did this past year to determine what the Steelers are going to try to do to find success. There’s plenty of other things that they should be stealing from other teams.

If the Pittsburgh Steelers were trying to do exactly what the Seattle Seahawks did in 2025, and actually were successful in implementing that blueprint, I still wouldn’t make them the odds-on favorite to win the Super Bowl. The same thing simply doesn’t work year-in and year-out. Even the Kansas City Chiefs flipped from being the top offense with an adequate defense to the top defense with an adequate offense in their back-to-back Super Bowl winning seasons.

Another example of this would be the Los Angeles Rams and their Super Bowl victory following the 2021 season. The Rams went “all in“ on trading away many draft picks to acquire key veteran pieces to make a run in the postseason. It worked. But I doubt the Rams could do it again in 2026. I’ve seen other teams take a similar philosophy and haven’t come anywhere close. It’s really difficult for the same plan to work every time.

I know there may not be a lot of people continuing to talk about the “Seahawks blueprint” after this week. But there were enough of them last week to make me notice. And it’s a good thing to break down. But rather than looking at everything the Seahawks did this last season, maybe the Steelers should simply look at some of the most important ones, as well as the ones that are transferable to what they could potentially do, and build from there.

To hear the latest Unpopular Opinion podcast, check it out in the player below. Thank you for checking out this podcast most every Sunday morning during the Steelers offseason.