PITTSBURGH (AP) — Mike Tomlin is well aware of his playoff resume, particularly the part where the Pittsburgh Steelers haven't won a postseason game in eight years.
The way the NFL's longest-tenured coach looks at it, the weight of those failures falls on his sturdy shoulders, not the team that will try to end that skid on Saturday in Baltimore.
“(That's) my story, not this collective's story,” Tomlin said Monday. “Many of these guys involved do not tote those bags. I happily tote those bags. But that's not something I'm going to project on the collective.”
Maybe because there are plenty of other things the Steelers (10-7) will lug to M&T Bank Stadium, namely a four-game losing streak to end the season that includes a lopsided loss to the Ravens (12-5) the weekend before Christmas.
Tomlin tried to strike an upbeat tone, pointing out that Monday is a “trash bag” day for the 18 teams that didn't reach the playoffs as they packed up their belongings and eyed an uncertain future. The Steelers, for the 12th time in Tomlin's 18 seasons, are not a part of that group.
Yet Pittsburgh also hasn't been part of a group that's advanced in January since the divisional round in 2016, the franchise's longest-playoff victory drought of the Super Bowl era and the ninth-longest active streak in the league.
Each of the flameouts has followed a similar pattern: the Steelers fall behind quickly early then spend the rest of the game futilely trying to catch up. It happened in the AFC championship in 2016, the divisional round in 2017 and the first round in 2020, 2021 and 2023.
While Tomlin always makes the distinction that the story of one season doesn't necessarily bleed into the story of another, the reality is Pittsburgh's late swoon has mirrored its recent postseason pratfalls.
The Steelers have fallen behind by multiple scores in the first half during every game of their current slide, including at Baltimore on Dec. 21.
Asked why his team struggles to “warm up to the game” — to borrow one of Tomlin's pet phrases — and he shrugged.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “Some of it has had to do it with some of the people that we played ... Some of it has to do with us, but rest assured that we’re working extremely hard to rectify it. And I’m excited about taking another whack at it.”
Pittsburgh's losing streak has come against three playoff teams (Baltimore, Philadelphia and Kansas City) and perhaps the best team that failed to reach the 14-team tournament ( Cincinnati ). Yet the Steelers didn't just lose those games, in most cases they were dominated, dropping the first three by at least 14 points. A late rally against the Bengals brought Pittsburgh within two, but only after it had fallen behind by 12 before showing signs of life that have been hard to come by of late.
Tomlin declined to single out any specific shortcoming, simply admitting that his team has learned plenty of lessons over the past month, with little time to absorb them against a familiar opponent led by a perennial MVP candidate (Lamar Jackson) that ended Pittsburgh's recent run of dominance in one of the NFL's most heated rivalries with a rare blowout victory on Dec. 21.
Despite the nature of the defeats, Tomlin doesn't believe his team is lacking in confidence.
“I just think that we’ve been in too many battles and we’ve had too much success to be fragile in that way,” he said. “We certainly can hate our recent performances and the outcome of those recent performances, but I don’t think it’s reflected in terms of how we feel about ourselves or our ability to make plays or engineer victory or win games.”
Maybe, but Pittsburgh's play against the league's elite has done little to provide optimism outside the building. Oddsmakers have made the Steelers the longest shot in the field to win the Super Bowl, much as they were a year ago when they went to Buffalo and were picked apart by Josh Allen.
That loss led to a significant offseason overhaul, particularly on offense. If the Steelers want to avoid another turbulent late winter and early spring, trying to regain the swagger that carried them to a 10-3 start is a must.
Backup quarterback Justin Fields was a part of that early success. Pittsburgh got off to a 4-2 start with Fields filling in for an injured Russell Wilson. Tomlin is open to reincorporating Fields in certain packages in search of a spark that's been missing, though Tomlin has been around long enough to know it will take more than one player or one play for Pittsburgh to shift the narrative that the franchise finds itself in the purgatory of “good but not good enough.”
“(I) don’t know that I’m looking for comfort, to be quite honest with you,” he said. “It’s important that we own our ills and build a course of action in which to correct it."
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Will Graves, The Associated Press
