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Brooke Pryor, ESPN Staff Writer
PITTSBURGH — The last thing members of the Pittsburgh Steelers see before reaching the inner sanctum of their locker room at Acrisure Stadium are steely silver letters mounted on a black cinder block wall. They spell out the same phrase coach Mike Tomlin repeats countless times a day: The Standard is the Standard.
With six Lombardis proudly displayed in the trophy case, the established standard of the prestigious franchise is a world championship. But with five straight postseason losses dating back to 2016, the Steelers have fallen short.
They enter Saturday’s prime-time wild-card game against the Baltimore Ravens (8 p.m. ET, Prime Video) having finished 10-7 — but on a four-game losing streak that cost them the AFC North title.
It’s been eight years since their last playoff win and 14 years since a Super Bowl berth. Tomlin’s lone Super Bowl win was nearly 16 years ago.
“What you mentioned is my story,” Tomlin said Monday, asked about the streak of playoff losses. “It’s not this collective’s story. Many of these guys involved do not tote those bags. I happily tote those bags, but it’s not something that I’m going to project on the collective.”
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Exactly 357 days earlier, Tomlin expressed the same sentiment to the Steelers’ team website ahead of the Steelers’ last attempt to break the cycle, a wild-card loss at the Buffalo Bills.
“It’s not their burden to bear,” Tomlin told the site last January. “I don’t ask them to tote my luggage. I don’t project my luggage onto them. … Sometimes you’re kidding yourself if you think history like that is important to guys who weren’t a part of it. It’s not.”
Despite the playoff skid, team owner and president Art Rooney II extended Tomlin a three-year contract extension prior to the 2024 season. But Rooney was also firm in his desire to snap the streak in last year’s end-of-season news conference.
“There’s an urgency,” Rooney said then of winning a playoff game. “I think everybody, myself, Mike, guys that have been on the team for a while … everybody, we’ve had enough of this. It’s time to get some wins. It’s time to take these next steps.”
And yet, despite appearing to take a step forward with a new quarterback room and an 8-2 start, the season-ending slide has seemingly put the Steelers farther away from breaking their one-and-done playoff cycle, let alone from a deep postseason run. The Steelers enter the playoffs in a frustratingly familiar spot as the albatross of the franchise’s longest playoff drought of the Super Bowl era enshrouds the legacy of a proud organization and the future Hall of Fame head coach who famously hasn’t had a losing season.
But to the Steelers faithful, never losing means a lot less if their team isn’t winning in the postseason.
EVEN IN THE wake of another first-round loss, members of the Steelers walked off the snowy Buffalo field a year ago feeling they were on the precipice of ending the drought. The team weathered a slew of injuries and inconsistent quarterback play to rally for the No. 7 seed.
With a solid, young nucleus of offensive skill position players — running back Najee Harris, wide receiver George Pickens and tight end Pat Freiermuth — to complement a veteran defense, the Steelers appeared a couple pieces away from being a contender.
“I do feel that we’re closer this year at this stage of the game than we were at this point last year,” Rooney said at the season-ending news conference. “I thought we had a really solid rookie class, a few guys that really stepped in as solid starters for the future. Need to do that again. Need to have another good draft class. I think we have a core group of players that we can compete [with.] I think the biggest thing we need is quality play at the quarterback position.”
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BEREA, Ohio — The Cleveland Browns’ disastrous trade for Deshaun Watson took another turn Friday, as the team announced the quarterback tore his right Achilles tendon again and underwent a second surgery.
In a statement, the team said Watson’s “recovery time and return to play status is uncertain, and he will likely miss significant time during the 2025 season.”
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Former Tennessee Titans star tight end Frank Wycheck suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head, at the time of his death just over a year ago.
Wycheck’s family confirmed the CTE diagnosis in a statement released Thursday, 13 months after the three-time Pro Bowler died from an apparent fall inside his home.
A study of Wycheck’s brain conducted at Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center concluded that Wycheck had CTE Stage III, according to his family. Stage IV is the most severe diagnosis.
“Our family is grateful to learn of his confirmed CTE diagnosis in hopes to continue our father’s desire to bring awareness, increased intervention, education, and support for NFL alumni and their families related to CTE,” Wycheck’s daughter, Deanna Wycheck Szabo, said in a statement. “Our hope is that NFL alumni, who believe they are suffering from CTE, will be given the much-needed resources and guidance prior to their symptoms reaching a debilitating state. With on-going CTE research and diagnosis’, we hope future NFL alumni and families will be explicitly given an outline and plan of action in receiving care and treatment.”
Wycheck was found dead at his Chattanooga, Tennessee, home on Dec. 9, 2023. He was 52.
The family’s announcement came one day after the 25th anniversary of the “Music City Miracle,” a play co-authored by Wycheck that stands as one of the most famous moments in NFL history.
At the end of the Titans’ wild-card playoff game against the
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Marcel Louis-Jacques, ESPN
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill did not walk back his recent comments about a potential exit from Miami but also never requested a trade during a meeting with the team this week, general manager Chris Grier said Tuesday.
Hill hinted that he was open to leaving the Dolphins following Sunday’s season-ending loss to the New York Jets, a game he removed himself from. Miami coach Mike McDaniel dismissed Hill’s actions as “emotional” after the game but commented further on the matter during Tuesday’s news conference.
“We met for, I want to say, an hour yesterday,” McDaniel said. “I think I was very direct with him, he was very honest, and it was great terms that we were discussing. Discussed multiple things, including, without wavering, that it’s not acceptable to leave the game and it won’t be tolerated in the future. He embraced accountability, and I wouldn’t say there was anything necessarily to fix as much as we had to clear the air in a rough and tumultuous situation.”
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Hill’s actions might be reflective of an overall issue the Dolphins faced behind the scenes this season. Multiple players alluded to unspecified teammates being repeatedly late to team meetings, which McDaniel confirmed Tuesday.
McDaniel said he fined players multiple times but concluded that the current punitive system was “not enough” and said changes will need to be made moving forward.
“I think it’s important that you let guys know that we’re at the point in our team where guys are firmly aware of the expectations,” he said. “And if your actions continually lead to final offenses that you’re telling me without words that you don’t want to be here. So, I think it’s very clear — I think it’s not an indictment necessarily of all [players], but we are subject to everyone’s actions as a football team, so we’ll address those as such.”
Hill turned in his worst statistical season since 2019, recording 81 catches for 959 yards and six touchdowns in 17 games. He played six of those games without starting quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, which he said made things difficult this season.
In his final evaluation of Tagovailoa’s season, Grier said the quarterback’s growth as a leader was notable. However, in his first season since signing a four-year, $212.1 million extension in July, he missed six games to injury — four while on injured reserve due to a concussion and the final two games due to a hip injury. Grier said that Tagovailoa must prioritize staying on the field.
“He needs to be available. He needs to know how to protect himself,” Grier said. “He needs to control what he can control. He understands that not being available after taking chances of risk is not acceptable to us.”
Tagovailoa, the NFL’s passing leader in 2023, said last week that he’d be available if the Dolphins were to make the playoffs, but McDaniel said he was at high risk to exacerbate the “unique muscle injury” if he didn’t allow himself to heal.
Grier said that the injury doesn’t pose any long-term concern for the team and that he is expected to be ready for the 2025 season.
