STEELERS WEEK 12: IT'S TIME AS BILLS BLOWOUT STEELERS

- Tyler Yasembousky, Contributor

I expected the Steelers to lose to Buffalo — they’re simply the better team.

What I didn’t expect was full-blown embarrassment.

As a Steelers fan, I wasn’t even angry. I was embarrassed.

This team has needed a complete teardown and rebuild for years, yet every season follows the exact same script: they look competitive early, collapse late, sneak into the playoffs with 9 or 10 wins, then get bounced immediately in pathetic fashion.

Rinse and repeat. This has been the Steelers since Big Ben retired.

Every year, I find myself hoping they actually lose more games so they can finally secure a meaningful draft pick. And every year, fellow fans call me a “hater” or a “traitor” for saying so — as if wanting to break a cycle of mediocrity is blasphemy.

But what has winning 9 or 10 games a year gotten us?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.

A large portion of the online fanbase has been calling for Tomlin’s job for a couple years now. But until Sunday, it was just internet noise.

For the first time ever, those chants came from the home crowd.

I never thought I’d see the Pittsburgh faithful publicly call for Tomlin’s firing. This is a man who’s never had a losing season and owns a Lombardi for this franchise.

But even the loyalists are starting to realize how insane it is to run back the same formula every season and expect something different.

It’s not that Mike Tomlin is a bad coach — he’s anything but.

It’s that the game may have passed him by. The league has shifted. The young, successful coaches are almost all offensive-minded innovators, and the Steelers are still trying to win with a philosophy that feels stuck in the mid-2010s.

At this point, a mutually agreed-upon breakup might be best for both sides. Pittsburgh needs a young offensive mind to modernize the organization, and Tomlin could immediately stabilize a struggling franchise elsewhere (the Giants, for example).

Sorry Mike — love you, respect you, but it’s time.

The Steelers, once 4–1, now sit at 6–6.

Next week they face the Baltimore Ravens, also 6–6, in a massive divisional showdown.

The winner takes first place in the AFC North.