Steelers Breakdown from PennLive.com

Rookie running back Najee Harris isn’t just the new kid on the block, but a Steelers savior the likes of which we haven’t seen since Mean Joe Greene was installed as the cornerstone building block of all those 1970s Super Bowl teams. Najee was the guy Steelers Nation coveted in the draft. The Alabama basher and dasher fills a huge need after the Steelers, a team that once prided itself on running...

The Steelers shuffle off to Buffalo to face the playoff-built Bills in Week 1 of the 2021 NFL season. It doesn’t get any easier from there, either. The Steelers are facing a brutal 2021 schedule regardless of how you slice and dice it. If you believe in stats, Pittsburgh is starring at an NFL gauntlet of games that ranks as the league’s most difficult. But it’s not only the opponents the Steelers...

National NFL pundits like ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. are poo-pooing Pittsburgh picking Najee Harris in the NFL draft. But one guy who knows what it takes to really roll in this league insists the Steelers just might have landed themselves the 2021 Offensive Rookie of the Year. Lynch, who’s now Najee’s agent, absolutely gushed about ‘his big, tall son’, saying “physically, he’s a G.D. freak of nature. I...

Don’t sleep on the New England Patriots swooping in and scooping up Justin Fields, leaving the Steelers with Kyle Trask. That’s because the NFL is a literal arms race. It’s all about the passer. But here your Pittsburgh Steelers sit with a plethora of needs, eight picks in the NFL draft, the first of which is at slot 24. Quarterbacks abound in this draft, but the top five, including Fields, could...

Word that Steelers’ Coach Mike Tomlin is now signed through the 2024 season ignited the typical polarized Pittsburgh reaction. According to the fiery arguments among Steel City fans, Tomlin is either the best of coaches, or among the worst of them. If you focus on Tomlin’s gaudy regular season win percentage, he’s right up there with the NFL’s elite. Should you be among those who choose to dwell o...

No one yet knows who’ll be catching NFL passes from Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields. Should the prodigal passer begin to fall in the NFL draft later this month, the Steelers should play his receiver -- and be there to catch him. Yes, holes in the Steelers’ 2021 roster are great and they are many, as Chuck Noll would say. And while they’ve swung a cap-friendly deal to keep Big Ben Roethlisberg...

When reports surfaced that Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson was disgruntled down in Houston and clamoring for a high-profile trade to another team, more than a few Steelers fans piped up in Pittsburgh that their favorite football team should make the deal, whatever the cost. Flashforward a couple of months, and now Watson is embroiled in an ugly sexual scandal that could lead to his lengthy suspe...

All of Pittsburgh, it seems, has the Steelers’ ponying up a first-round pick on a running back to revive the team’s moribund ground game, which last season resembled a grave where running plays went to die. Even Steelers President Art Rooney II is on record saying the Steelers must run the ball far better in 2021. Surely, that translates into Kevin Colbert, Mike Tomlin and company picking the like...

Chase Claypool apparently kicking a man who is down isn’t just a bad look. It could be highly problematic with regards to the NFL Conduct policy. Worse it’s a troubling sign Claypool is headed down the wrong path that’s been frequented by Steelers’ receivers of late. The band leader for bad behavior was Antonio Brown. But many critical of the JuJu Smith-Schuster re-signing cite his attention to In...

Sadly, it’s the Steelers way: Stand back while your team hemorrhages talent to the highest bitter. The Steelers’ brain trust has long viewed NFL free agency as Bizarro World. Free-spending teams pony up insane prices for top players, only to see their collection of high-priced spare parts fail to perform as a winning team on the field. This knock on free agency was especially true when fat-pockete...

It’s only the most important position on the football field. Why shouldn’t monopolize all those mock drafts being floated around that have the Steelers snatching a top quarterback in 2021 NFL draft? On the same week that Ben Roethlisberger celebrated his 39th birthday, the Steelers were being linked to Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields. Other intriguing Pittsburgh quarterback possibilities incl...

Just when you thought an aging Ben Roethlisberger was out, the Steelers blink and pull him back in. After 17 mostly glorious seasons, it should have come to this instead: A messy but ultimately necessary divorce for Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers, which I detail in the podcast. That's because it certainly sounded as if Steelers’ General Manager Kevin Colbert was ready to move on from Big Ben...

When it comes to a Watt Brothers reunion in Pittsburgh, there’s a lot of heat, but not a lot of light. You have T.J. Watt all but begging his brother to sign with the Steelers, uniting those two and fullback Derek Watt in black and gold. And what football franchise wouldn’t want to unite this Wisconsin football family? The mere prospect has Steelers’ fans lighting it up on social media. It is high...

It wasn’t just that Steelers’ nemesis Tom Brady single-handedly bested the entire Pittsburgh football franchise by achieving his seventh Super Bowl win. The Steelers have just six Lombardis. And it wasn’t watching Brady’s been-there, done-that cool, as the 43-year-old quarterback played the Kansas City Chief defense like a fiddle in his 10th Super Bowl appearance. It wasn’t even witnessing Brady c...

The L.A. Rams just showed what it takes to go all in for a Super Bowl. The Rams are a peaking team full of offensive weapons and a dominate defense in its prime. The missing ingredient? A quarterback capable of taking them there. Sound familiar? Well, that’s where the similarities end, Steelers fans. As Pittsburgh debates the proper end of the Ben Roethlisberger era, the Rams did whatever it took...

Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford, Dwayne Haskins: Visions of new starting quarterbacks in Pittsburgh are dancing in the heads of Steelers fans. So what’s football fact and what is fan fantasy? Rodgers is fresh from being vanquished from the playoffs by Tom Brady (with his new team). Worse, Rodgers remains miffed the Packers drafted a quarterback instead of a receiver in the first round of 2020’s dr...

Wednesday saw a major changing of the guard. No, I am not talking about the U.S. presidency. I’m speaking of the retirement of Roethlisberger’s draft mate, Philip Rivers. Rivers is heeding Old Man River in joining fellow 2004 draftee Elie Manning in the post-football world, where the water is fine. And Rivers looked a heck of a lot better than Ben Roethlisberger going down the stretch this season....

It’s now painfully clear the Steelers have the worst quarterback in the AFC North. The Steelers division rivals all possess young, up-and-coming QBs. Two were taken at the top of recent drafts, and the third was a steal at the bottom of the first round. The Steelers have an aging, diminished Big Ben Roethlisberger. Yet what comes after Ben is even scarier for Steelers Nation. Just ask your father...

The NFL playoffs are marked by legendary but bizarre games. You got the Fog Bowl, the Ice Bowl and now we have the COVID Bowl. The Cleveland Browns are limping into Pittsburgh with their supposedly genius head coach and a growing list of players on quarantine due to the coronavirus. The depleted Cleveland team has Steelers Nation brimming with confidence ahead of Sunday night’s Wild Card game -- d...

Troy Polamalu is an enigma. He just might be the closest things pro football has ever had to a superhero. He off-the-field alter-ego, however, is meeker and milder than Clark Kent. He had supernatural ability to immediately diagnose, then blow up an opposing team’s play. He vaulted over the line of scrimmage and tackled the quarterback nanoseconds after the snap. He took a flying leap to snatch a...

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Big Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers QB nicknamed after the famous London clock tower. Steelers Nation is populated by a significant number of spoiled fans once-relishing a perfect season but now turning on their Hall of Fame quarterback. Many are seemingly ready to write off Big Ben after two-straight losses. To be sure, Big Ben looked bad in the beat...

December could prove to be the cruelest month once again for these Steelers. If so, it will be because the seeds of the Steelers’ offensive implosion were sewn back in August. That’s when a surgically repaired Big Ben Roethlisberger first showed signs his deep ball wasn’t there anymore. He and the Steelers have shied away from it ever since. Now, it’s all coming home to roost, threatening to ruin...

When does a Steelers win, even over the hated Ravens, fell like a loss? When you drop passes all over Heinz Field, fumble a punt, give up a long touchdown pass to the third-string QB – and most of all when you lose your relentless pass rusher, Bud Dupree, to a season-ending knee injury. This stomach-turning Steelers win feels like a major turning point in Pittsburgh’s here-to-fore euphoric season....

The running game has long been sacred for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Absent a running game, the Steelers offense -- indeed it’s entire football philosophy -- just didn’t work. Until now. Until Big Ben Roethlisberger, wise and wily in his 17th season and seeing the field like never before, can dump off the football at will. Until these four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for NFL defenses. I’m talking abo...

Pop a Prozac, Pittsburgh. Football warning signs are flashing brightly and loudly in the 412 area code about these far-from perfect 8-0 Steelers, who seem to be flirting with their first loss week in and week out. Yes, I’m talking about the real risk of this supposedly perfect team losing to the better-than-advertised Joe Burrow-led Bengals at Heinz Field this Sunday. The biggest worry centers on...