When “The Standard Is the Standard” Stops Being the Standard in Pittsburgh Steelers Football

Introduction: A Slogan As a Measuring Stick

In Pittsburgh, “The Standard is the Standard” functions as more than a coach’s sound bite. It is a cultural claim about continuity: the Steelers will play disciplined football, develop talent, contend for championships, and crucially avoid the organizational drift that defines many NFL franchises. Mike Tomlin has used the phrase to emphasize that injuries, lineup changes, and adversity do not lower expectations; the team refuses to “grade ourselves on a curve.”

Yet slogans acquire meaning only when performance sustains them. Over the last decade, the Steelers have maintained regular-season respectability while struggling to produce the postseason outcomes that traditionally anchor Pittsburgh’s identity. The franchise’s rhetoric has remained maximalist championship standard, not participation, while the team’s results have increasingly resembled a different kind of standard: consistent competitiveness without profound January relevance. The moment when “The Standard” stops being the standard is not a single loss or a single season. It is a pattern: organizational stability becomes an alibi, and baseline competence gradually substitutes for the franchise’s historic benchmark of serious Super Bowl contention.

This article argues that the Steelers’ “standard” began to function less as a competitive promise and more as an institutional narrative during the post-2016 period, when regular-season floors stayed high but postseason ceilings collapsed. The mismatch between brand identity and competitive outcomes became clearest in three overlapping developments: (1) an extended playoff-win drought, (2) offensive stagnation that persisted long enough to force rare staff disruption, and (3) a destabilizing transition at quarterback after Ben Roethlisberger’s era ended.

I. The standard as organizational identity—and as symbolic capital

Sports organizations do not only win games; they manufacture legitimacy. In the Steelers’ case, legitimacy has historically come from a combination of continuity (rare coaching turnover), defensive tradition, and postseason achievement. The phrase “The Standard is the Standard” compresses that history into a portable ideology: whoever plays, however the circumstances change, the Steelers remain the Steelers. Tomlin’s own explanation stresses professionalism, resistance to comfort, and an insistence that the opponent “on the schedule” receives Pittsburgh’s best version of itself.

But in a results-driven league, symbolic capital depreciates if it no longer translates into playoff leverage. A brand can remain powerful, but national fans still treat Pittsburgh as a “serious” franchise, while competitive outputs tell a more sobering story. That tension matters because the slogan does not merely describe an internal mindset. It also manages external expectations: it reassures fans, sponsors, and media that the franchise possesses a special institutional competence that will eventually outlast temporary slumps. When the slump becomes a multi-year pattern, the slogan’s function shifts from aspiration to insulation.

II. Postseason outcomes: when respectability stops being persuasion

A simple way to locate the “standard no longer standard” inflection is to measure what Pittsburgh is for. Historically, Steelers football has meant January games that matter, often deep January games. In that light, the team’s postseason record since the mid-2010s is the central evidence of slippage.

The Steelers’ most recent playoff win came in the 2016 season, when they defeated the Miami Dolphins 30–12 in the Wild Card round on January 8, 2017. Since then, the franchise has repeatedly reached the postseason but failed to convert appearances into wins, turning “making it” into a plateau rather than a step. Pro-Football-Reference’s team playoff log captures this arc: Pittsburgh remains one of the league’s iconic postseason franchises overall, but the recent portion of that history reads as stagnation rather than advancement.

Two recent playoff losses highlight the recurring problem: falling behind early, failing to sustain offense, and watching the opponent control the game script. In January 2024, the Steelers lost 31–17 to Buffalo in the Wild Card round. In January 2025, they lost 28–14 to Baltimore in another Wild Card matchup, trailing significantly before a late push made the score look more competitive than the game actually was.

These games matter not because single losses define a franchise, but because they illustrate a pattern: the Steelers have often entered playoff weekends as a team that can compete, then played like a team built to survive the regular season rather than dictate theof the postseason. At a certain point in the postseason, the brand promise (“we do not grade on a curve”) collides with the functional reality that the organization has, in effect, lived on a curve celebrating floors (non-losing seasons, contention for a berth). At the same time, the league’s top tier is defined by ceilings (home-field advantage, elite scoring efficiency, adaptable game plans in January).

III. Offensive stagnation and the limits of continuity

If defense and culture form the Steelers’ self-image, then offense has been the site where “The Standard” has most visibly failed to reproduce itself. The Matt Canada era crystallized the issue by combining on-field underperformance with a perception of institutional inertia.

In 2022, Pittsburgh scored 308 points (18.1 per game), ranking 26th in the NFL. In 2023, the Steelers scored 17.9 points per game. Whether one attributes those numbers to quarterback development, line play, scheme, or all of the above, the broader organizational point is this: Pittsburgh’s offense spent multiple seasons operating as a constraint rather than a weapon. That reality is difficult to reconcile with a championship-level “standard,” because modern Super Bowl contention typically requires either high-end offensive production or a historically dominant defense. The Steelers were neither.

The franchise’s eventual decision to fire Canada in November 2023 signaled that continuity had reached its breaking point. The move was notable precisely because the Steelers have long been defined by patience and stability; when a team known for rare in-season firings makes an in-season firing, it tacitly acknowledges that the “standard” has been violated internally, not merely externally.

This episode exposes a more profound contradiction: the Steelers’ institutional identity prizes steadiness, but modern competitive advantage often demands rapid adaptation. When the league shifts motion usage and spacing concepts, QB-friendly sequencing, organizations must update faster than their own traditions. “The Standard” can motivate resilience; it can also become a reason not to change quickly. In that sense, the slogan becomes dangerous when it blurs two different virtues: commitment to excellence (good) and commitment to sameness (not always good).

Example: Canada’s firing did not simply reflect a bad month of football; it marked the end of a long stretch in which the offense struggled to generate points at a league-average rate. The Steelers tolerated that condition long enough that fans and analysts began to treat the organization’s famed stability as stagnation. When stability stops producing competitive advantage, it ceases to be “the standard” and becomes a structural vulnerability.

IV. Quarterback transition: from franchise certainty to managed instability

The Steelers’ modern identity was built, in part, on rare continuity at quarterback. Roethlisberger’s long tenure allowed Pittsburgh to absorb schematic changes, injuries, and roster turnover while keeping a stable offensive ceiling. After that era ended, the franchise entered a period of quarterback churn that redefined what “standard” meant on Sundays.

The Kenny Pickett experiment, drafted as a potential success, ended when Pittsburgh traded him to the Eagles in March 2024, a transaction reported by Reuters that also sounded like the Steelers were reshaping the room after signing Russell Wilson. ESPN similarly framed the 2024 offseason as a rapid reengineering of the quarterback position, including the trade for Justin Fields. By early 2025, Steelers.com position reviews described a 2024 quarterback group featuring Wilson and Fields (among others), an explicit sign that the team was searching for functional answers rather than building around a long-term centerpiece.

This matters because “The Standard” implicitly promises that Pittsburgh does cause chaos. But quarterback instability imports chaos even when the building stays calm. It changes the offense’s weekly identity, compresses the margin for error, and often forces a conservative game plan that relies on defense and field position. That model can produce respectable records. It rarely produces postseason breakthroughs against elite opponents.

Example: The Steelers’ playoff losses in 2024 and 2025 illustrate how hard it is to win January games when the offense cannot reliably dictate pace early. Buffalo jumped ahead and controlled the matchup in 2024; Baltimore did the same in 2025. In both cases, the Steelers’ margin for error was thin, and once the game tilted, Pittsburgh lacked the offensive inevitability that historically characterized genuine contenders.

V. So when did the “standard” stop being the standard?

The most defensible answer is that it happened gradually after the 2016 season, when the Steelers’ last playoff win occurred (January 8, 2017). From that point forward, Pittsburgh sustained its pursuit for competence, often finishing in contention and returning to the postseason while falling short of the franchise’s historic standard of postseason advancement. The gap between the slogan and the outcomes widened as three trends hardened into structure:

1. Playoff appearances stopped functioning as proof of superiority and started functioning as proof of adequacy, especially given repeated Wild Card exits.

   
   

2. Offensive underperformance persisted long enough that a stability-first organization made a midseason coordinator firing an implicit admission that patient continuity had stopped working.

   
   

3. Quarterback certainty gave way to a rotating search, turning Pittsburgh’s famed organizational calm into a strategy of managed improvisation.

Together, these dynamics suggest a reframing: Pittsburgh’s “standard” in the late 2010s and early 2020s increasingly became a standard of not collapsing rather than a standard of dominating when it matters. That is still a virtue many franchises would envy, but it is not the Steelers’ historical promise.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Phrase By Changing What It Protects

“The Standard is the Standard” remains a powerful organizing idea, but it cannot be sustained as a brand substitute for postseason success. If Pittsburgh wants the phrase to mean what it once implied, the organization must treat it not as a shield against criticism but as a demand for modern competitive advantage, especially on offense and at quarterback. Tomlin’s original framing rejects comfort and rejects grading on a curve. The challenge is that the franchise’s recent trajectory has looked exactly like curve-grading: celebrating consistency while accepting January disappointment as routine.

In Pittsburgh, the standard stops being the standard when it no longer predicts outcomes when it describes ethos without delivering leverage. The Steelers do not need to abandon the slogan. They need to make it expensive again: a standard that costs comfort, costs complacency, and costs the organization the right to treat “in the hunt” as the destination rather than the baseline.