14. Pittsburgh Steelers
Pittsburgh will have played on Sunday Night Football
As I had said with the Baltimore Ravens, the Pittsburgh Steelers are another team simply not built to win in the NFL playoff, so if the Steelers beat the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday Night Football, that’s as far as they’ll go in the playoffs.
The AFC North was once a proud division, but it’s since turned into one of the more pathetic ones in the NFL. The Steelers just do not seem to be taking the QB position seriously at all. Aaron Rodgers has been fine this year, but that’s it.
Until Pittsburgh gets serious here, they won’t make any progress in the AFC, a conference that now has a ton of young quarterback talent. Pittsburgh also needs to invest more into the offensive side of the ball and get with the times in that regard.
The Steelers don’t scare teams anymore and are probably going to be in a hotly contested, close game with the Ravens. Pittsburgh feels like an average team at best.
13. Green Bay Packers
The Green Bay Packers had already clinched the no. 7 playoff seed before Week 18 kicked off, this is one of the more rare situations where a playoff team legitimately had nothing to play for. The seventh seed will play against the two seed.
The Packers’ season has gone off the rails a bit even before this meaningless loss, as Micah Parsons went down with a torn ACL a few weeks ago, and other players began to get hurt. The Packers are honestly limping into the playoffs at 9-7-1, and it’s a bit shocking to see how far this team fell off after a very promising mid-season surge.
You don’t get the sense that Green Bay will be able to make any progress in the playoffs, as they could again be looking at a one-and-done postseason. At some point, we might have to begin talking about some deeper issues if this team can’t make a playoff run in the next year or so.