American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States exists on a separate political and moral plane from the rest of the world. The NFL has its own version of this idea, and it comes from Pittsburgh.
You—a football fan not living under a rock—have encountered what I call “Steelers exceptionalism” many times. It is the idea that the NFL franchise in Pittsburgh operates differently from every other team in the league. Not just differently, but in a more old-fashioned, blue-collar, even stoic manner that signals a general superiority over the league’s other 31 franchises. This complex emanates from the team’s owners, the Rooney family, and it courses through local and national media, fans, and even PR-savvy players who know exactly what the locals want to hear.
“You walk in the door at Latrobe or the South Side or going to Acrisure Stadium,” Aaron Rodgers said in mid-August, name-checking the insurance company that bought the naming rights to the stadium formerly known as Heinz Field in 2022, “you just feel there’s a way to conduct yourself to honor the greats who played before you.” Rodgers spent the early offseason trying to get a job with the Minnesota Vikings and then pondered well into the summer whether he was willing to play a season with the Steelers. But the four-time MVP knows how to butter a biscuit, and in Pittsburgh, appealing to history is critical. “Steelers football” is a more recognizable, understandable term than “Chiefs football” or “Eagles football” or “any currently good team’s football” because commentators have deployed it for decades in alluding to Pittsburgh’s defense and run game.
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The team’s on-field identity is laced with nostalgia for a bygone era, and its business practices lean in the same direction. The Steelers do not negotiate contracts once the season has begun, a decades-long policy that the organization uses to talk up its commitment to focusing on football rather than business. They are one of a handful of teams that continue to report to a tiny college in the middle of nowhere (apologies to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the former home of my grandfather) for training camp. All around the Steelers, you will find little touches designed to show how different they are. This team will never have cheerleaders. The Steelmark logo hasn’t been updated since 1962 and is on just one side of the helmet. It goes on and on.
If this sounds like a setup to say the Steelers are actually no different from anyone else, that’s not quite the case. They have won six Super Bowls, after all, a record that the Tom Brady–Bill Belichick Patriots later tied. And for 50 years, the Steelers often have been exceptional. In the 1970s, Chuck Noll built the Steel Curtain dynasty. In the 1980s, well, umm, let’s just pretend that decade never happened, as most Steelers fans do. In the 1990s, they were a fun team that contended often under Bill Cowher. In the 2000s, they won two more Lombardi Trophies. They didn’t win a Super Bowl in the 2010s, but they played in one and fielded some of the most fun offenses in recent history, with Ben Roethlisberger, Le’Veon Bell, and Antonio Brown leading the way. Even when those Steelers were doing things like losing a home playoff game to Blake Bortles, they were captivating.
Halfway into a new decade, the franchise’s differentiation has dimmed. The Steelers have won 50 games since 2020, seventh most in the NFL and somehow only two fewer than the cross-state Eagles. But they’ve had a knack for starting seasons hot, stumbling late, and, most importantly, not winning any playoff games since the last weeks of the Obama administration. The days of the low-drama Steelers ended years ago. The team now has frequent contractual standoffs with star players and generates as many gossipy locker-room stories as anyone outside of North Texas. Roethlisberger started to decline in 2020, and his retirement in 2022 left the team without a good quarterback for the first time since the early 2000s. Still, they are never bad; Mike Tomlin’s 18-year streak of non-losing seasons is an inescapable football fact. With Cowher’s final three years baked in, the franchise is at 21 non-losing seasons in a row, which ties the league record. The Steelers will own it all for themselves if they can go 8-8-1 this season.
Something is about to give, though. The only exceptional thing about the Steelers at this point is their interminable existence somewhere between good and bad, but nobody treads water forever. The Steelers seem to know that, and they have taken some short-term swings in an effort to move up rather than down. They skipped out on drafting an early-round quarterback prospect this year and are trying instead to coax one last good season out of Rodgers. They made blockbuster trades (George Pickens and Minkah Fitzpatrick out, DK Metcalf and Jalen Ramsey in). They blinked at the end of a contract fight with an on-the-wrong-side-of-30 T.J. Watt. Maybe that will all work out, and the Steelers will be something more than the annual wild-card pushover they are now. Maybe that will flame out spectacularly, and it will at least be possible to rubberneck the disaster.
Then there is the middle possibility—that the Steelers will turn in a typical 9-8 or 10-7 record and lose by 21 to a real contender on the opening weekend of the playoffs. In the context of their busy offseason, that would only set a fresh standard for boring mediocrity. Pittsburgh can’t stay different by being the most middling team in the league. One way or another, this final bastion of Steelers exceptionalism is on its last legs.
The NFL has a standard quarterback development cycle: Find a good, young passer. Sign him to an extension. Put a decent team around him. Hope you win a Super Bowl or two. Sign him to another extension. Try to squeeze out a late-career championship. Watch the QB become bad. Get a good draft pick. Find a good quarterback. Do it all again.
Pittsburgh has tried to avoid going through all of those motions. Roethlisberger was unplayable by the end of 2021, and the Steelers nudged him into retirement after a wild-card loss in which he could barely throw the ball 20 yards down the field. The Steelers saw an opportunity in the 2022 draft, when Pitt’s Kenny Pickett, who shared a practice facility with them for four years, was there for the taking at no. 20. Pickett turned out to be bad, as mid-first-round quarterbacks often tend to be. In the time since that flameout ended, with Pickett requesting a trade after 2023, the Steelers have tried to make their way to fringe contention using stopgaps. Hello and goodbye, Justin Fields and Russell Wilson. Hello, Rodgers, for what nobody seems to expect will be more than about eight months in black and gold.
All of these decisions have been defensible. They paid less than $5 million for Fields and Wilson last season. The Steelers did not need to be the team to roll the Jaxson Dart or Shedeur Sanders dice last April. But these choices have left the franchise in QB purgatory, angling for one season of above-average (but no longer elite) play from a 41-year-old passer two years removed from a torn Achilles tendon. The marriage with Rodgers is so profoundly un-Steelers, at least in terms of how the team has long seen itself. The NFL’s self-styled no-drama franchise has a glorified podcaster—a paid regular on The Pat McAfee Show, for God’s sake—behind center. But signing Rodgers is a bet on Steelers exceptionalism and on Tomlin. The two talk about each other like kindred football spirits. Years ago, when Rodgers was playing for the Packers, he and Tomlin basically flirted with each other with their eyes as they tried to outfox each other via pre-snap machinations. The Steelers think that their organizational culture and Tomlin’s leadership will result in a Rodgers who is less Jetsy and more like his old self. This strikes me as a fair wager. As reduced as the Steelers currently are, they are not the New York Jets.
It has to be tempting, at some point, for the Steelers to bottom out for a year and chase a top-five pick. But they couldn’t encourage that this year without absorbing a particular hit to their idea of themselves. Watt and Cameron Heyward are both first-team All-Pros, at or near the top of their games. Heyward just turned in the best season of his career as a 35-year-old defensive tackle. These guys aren’t just good; they are ideal Steelers, right out of central casting. Nothing is more old-school Steelers than accumulating 108 sacks in eight years, as Watt has done, or reestablishing oneself as one of the league’s best interior linemen in your mid-30s, as Heyward has done. Preemptively surrendering a season with these players on the roster might cause a fan mutiny. It would absolutely destroy whatever reputation the Steelers still have as a special organization.
At one point, the Steelers really did seem to run a more harmonious organization than their competitors. One manifestation of that? The franchise didn’t see a major player hold out in training camp for more than a decade in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. That streak ended with Hines Ward in 2005, though, and now the Steelers have as many testy contract disputes as anybody else, if not more. Heyward, a model Steeler, was the no. 1 target of Pittsburgh sports talk radio callers this summer as he pushed the team for a new contract a year after signing an extension he then outplayed. Even the kicker, Chris Boswell, held in.
The modern Steelers locker room has seen countless mini-dramas, and some major ones, in the past decade. Sometimes, even Tomlin has been unable to reach talented players and maximize their skills. The über-talented Pickens never stopped having regular sideline outbursts before the Steelers dealt him and his 12 career touchdowns to Dallas. “We want volunteers, not hostages,” Tomlin has been fond of saying. Sometimes, it looks like the Steelers keep a lot of hostages. The franchise finished 28th in the NFLPA report card grades last year. Do players like being Steelers, relatively speaking? Did they ever? It’s not an unreasonable question. The Steelers pride themselves on unglamorous ruggedness, but I’m not sure that works anywhere now. A good metaphor for Pittsburgh’s place in the sport arrived late last season, when the Steelers, famously resistant to HBO’s Hard Knocks cameras, were forced to let them into the building for the first time. They had always seemed above the NFL’s version of reality TV, but no more. It was probably a coincidence that the team collapsed not long after the show rolled into town. Probably.
The 2025 Steelers have only the smallest sliver of a Super Bowl hope, but their performance will carry significant legacy ramifications for both their coach and quarterback.
Tomlin and Rodgers will both have busts at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but this season will carry weight for both of their images. There have been lots of great NFL coaches, but Tomlin’s calling card isn’t his 2009 Super Bowl win. It’s his stubborn refusal to ever put a genuinely bad team on the field. Tomlin doesn’t acknowledge his streak, but a losing season would remove his greatest mark of exceptionalism. Rodgers could use a good season so that his post–Green Bay years could be remembered for something, anything, other than his injured and awful run with the Jets. He likely won’t get a Super Bowl ring with a second franchise, as Tom Brady and Peyton Manning did, but at least his closing season could produce something. He would rather not be the quarterback responsible for turning a coach who never has losing seasons into a loser.
The clock is ticking. When this season ends, Tomlin and Rodgers will have either authored a Steelers renaissance, presided over the end of the team’s historic run of competence, or left the franchise lurking in the same middling, untenable spot it now inhabits. If it’s the latter, then the Steelers will have ground their most interesting offseason in years into the same boring paste they’ve produced for the better part of a decade. A losing season would be excruciating, not because experiencing nine or more losses would make for an unpleasant fall but because it would cost the Steelers and their fans their last data point in the war over whether this team really is different. Then, the Steelers might have to consider living like everyone else.