With football season beginning as I write this, I have a yearly tradition of making predictions for every NFL game in the upcoming season. It’s really quite simple, it is based on my own opinions of each team and who I think will win any given matchup. I repeat this process for every game until I have completely predicted the season. Usually, I am wrong, but I do this for fun mostly. I usually use this NFL predictor website which I have found to be a good tool for this particular purpose.
Having said all of that, my predictions for the season are as shown in these two images, the first being my ranks for the AFC, and the second for the NFC.
Since these contain a lot of information to digest at once, I will summarize. For the AFC, I have the following seven teams making the playoffs: Buffalo (15 wins), Tennessee (13 wins), Kansas City (13 wins) and Cincinnati (12 wins) as the division champions, with Los Angeles, New England and Baltimore taking the three wild card spots with 11 wins each. In the NFC, I have Green Bay (13), Los Angeles (12), Tampa Bay (11), and Philadelphia (9) as your NFC division champions, with San Francisco (12), Minnesota (9) and Dallas (9) taking the three Wild Card spots.
What I do not do, at least at this time of year, is make playoff predictions. I feel that the projection of a team as they are at the beginning of the year and as they are in the playoffs are too different to make it meaningful to predict the playoffs as the year starts. I save my playoff predictions for when the playoff picture is set and we have a better idea of what these teams are, don’t worry though, I’m still painfully wrong when it comes to predicting the playoffs.
The rest of this post is going to be focused on my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. I have us finishing with 9 wins and 8 losses, which is a respectable record, though nowhere near good enough to make it to the playoffs in a loaded AFC. I have three teams finishing in wild card spots with 11 wins, three more teams out of the playoffs with 10 wins, then us at 11th place in the conference with 9 wins, well out of the AFC playoff picture. It is an interesting contrast to the NFC, where three teams make it into the playoffs with that same total of 9 wins. I simply think the Steelers are not quite as good as the rest of their competition, we are a talented but young team with work to do before we are ready to contend. Notably, we are in a transition period at the most important position on the field, our quarterback is Mitch Trubisky, a free agent pickup from Buffalo who is most like a serviceable stopgap until our first round draft pick Kenny Pickett is ready to take the reins. Furthermore, our offensive line is an area of major concern, and likely a reason we are not starting Kenny Pickett over Trubisky. Trubisky, as a veteran quarterback, is better equipped to deal with a deficient line than Pickett will be, and thus it makes sense to protect Pickett by letting him learn and develop in practice rather than in live games.
Factoring all of this in, I do not think the Steelers will be able to claim one of the seven playoff spots given that the AFC is loaded with talented teams. I have the full Steelers schedule broken down as follows:
This record of 9-8 has us finishing 3rd in our division, again, not good enough to clinch a playoff spot. This is fine, we are a young team building toward contention rather than a team that must win now. We have work to do before we are ready to seriously contend for a Super Bowl championship, but we will be there sooner than you think. I have had Renegade blasting over my headset with a Steelers jersey on my back and a Terrible Towel in my pocket on my walks to class all week for a reason. We’re coming for our 7th championship, HERE WE GO, STEELERS HERE WE GO!