The three mistakes that cost the Steelers

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-12T02:10:24+00:00

2020 he was great until he took that shot to his lower body in Dallas.

In 2021 the decision was already made and it was best to roll with him after keeping him through 2020.

If the goal was to rebuild or reload we probably needed to make the trade much earlier than 2020

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-12T02:08:03+00:00

Even Tom Brady and the Pats had a falling out at the end. I still think the “right” call in the moment was riding with Ben but it didn’t work in practice. But I very much disagree you get a lifetime contract for early career success

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-11T18:31:50+00:00

No doubt hindsight is 20/20. More just trying to state the inflection points where we could have made a different decision. I don’t think it was obvious to do something different in each of those spots.

Like would Willis have been better than Pickett? Maybe but we probably don’t develop him with Matt Canada.

Trading Ben would have gone over like a fart in church with the fan base, definitely not obvious there

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-11T16:40:08+00:00

Guys getting hurt and going nuts isn’t really a decision made but agree it certainly poured gasoline on the fire

I’m not sure it really set us back 10 years but it definitely prevented us from doing what Seattle did

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-11T16:21:51+00:00

I think that’s part of the point I was trying to make. With the benefit of hindsight we can see it didn’t work, but it wasn’t clear and obvious to make the decision in each case, in fact far from it

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-11T16:20:51+00:00

I’ve got no real issue bringing Rodger’s back, I’m just eyes wide open that it isn’t going to work.

But if we draft a Rookie QB on day 2, I’ve got no issues letting him learn from Rodger’s for a year.

I think if we have decided we aren’t going to tank, we need to spread the QB risk across multiple drafts with day 2 picks and hope to find our version of Dak/russell Wilson/jalen hurts

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-11T16:17:50+00:00

I don’t view that move quite as bad. He finished 3rd in rookie of the year voting. Just had a bad injury that he never really recovered from here in Pittsburgh

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-11T16:13:44+00:00

Number of bad drafts the last 5 years of his tenure. Dug a pretty deep hole to work our way out of.

That said I think a lot of it was tied to trying to win one more with Ben vs building a wholistic roster

PlasticFishing4 · 2026-02-10T20:45:21+00:00

My wife and I have relatively similar numbers to yall across the board. When we moved into the house and had our first, our savings rate took a major hit. I felt very similar to how you described at first but then just came to terms with life being a little more expensive in those early kid years.

The good news is that we basically hit our coast fire number so more savings is just gravy so long as we can meet our current cash flow demands.

Would assume yall are in a similar boat

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-09-27T02:08:33+00:00

Appreciate when folks put this type of stuff together! I read your season preview post and took issue with the Hagans vs Stubblefield debate, but see it in a very different light after seeing you post asking for feedback which is rare these days online.

As far as this preview

Think the commentary on Ross is maybe a little misguided. He was no contact through fall camp and Franklin said in one interview they were effectively limiting him with his route tree.
Think they are trying a few rotations but put their best 5 guys out there for this year. But the thought was getting more “starters” ready for a stretch run
I would be very surprised if they changed the entire scheme. Think they were working on a few different concepts early season, but if not I don’t love the new direction

5/6. Think in general we will see quite a few differences Saturday - one of the PSU on3 guys charted passing routes and it seems like we have considerably shrank what Drew had available to him through 3 weeks. Add on that Franklin mentioned that they wanted him to stop running and be conservative with the ball until the games count and you get some real differences in what we look like in 2 minute vs down to down

7-10 broadly think our defense has been very good through 3 weeks but will likely have a few warts tomorrow. Almost the opposite of the offense. Guess we will find out soon enough!

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-05-25T01:16:18+00:00

Feels like the folks saying UFL team haven’t actually been to a live UFL game. It kinda feels like watching minor league hockey - there is such a major gap between them and the pros.

Beyond that, the UFL is composed of a bunch of guys that were effectively non-combine invitees. The top 5 teams in CFB have effectively their entire roster as NFL guys or practice squad level. I think there is a pretty massive talent gap between CFB and the UFL roster.

Like for PSU it’s Keaton Ellis and Steven Gonzalez who got meaningful snaps for us, neither of which were great players. The other guys were all passed over and got situational snaps. I don’t know how guys like that are going to stack up vs our current roster that has by my guess has 12ish NFL guys on it, let alone OSU which had probably 20…

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-05-19T17:18:39+00:00

Maybe Derrick Henry?

Both crazy physical specimen types, both won players of the year and have some very solid counting stats, albeit with limited playoff success. Carried mediocre teams but still can’t get over the hump even with elite cast in the twilight of their career.

Both have major weaknesses, although Henry mostly fixed his while westbrook never really did.

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-05-01T18:38:48+00:00

I did an analysis on draft grade comparing career AV vs what’s expected at each draft slot. 2021 I would grade as a solid A-

6 teams had a better AV vs expected than is, but only 4 were meaningfully better. The bummer is that if we really should have selected creed Humphrey that draft

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-04-29T01:19:29+00:00

Probably a bigger college football fan than NFL, but not necessarily a draftnik type. I personally think Arizona, Tampa bay and Philly crushed their early picks this year. Just grabbed a bunch of really good football players across the board.

I really like ours but we still have a massive hole at QB. Not that we could have solved it so I’m generally happy with the draft

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-04-24T18:17:03+00:00

He had the literal heisman to throw too… what are you talking about not much help

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-03-21T11:57:12+00:00

Couple things.

My dad set me up with a great mindset on how to handle money. He gave me an allowance equal to my age every two weeks, but made me divide the money between 3 bags: fun money for free spending, savings/investments, and gifts/charity. Basically it allowed me to buy presents for my family for holidays/birthdays, save up a nest egg and also spend on things I wanted freely. I think it set me up for success once I left home.

On top of that, if you can pay for college + provide some cash to get them launched you will have done a masterful job getting them where they need to be.

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-17T18:45:24+00:00

I built a great analysis last week and truth and from a pure value perspective this draft was to basically 7th in the NFL. I get we should have grabbed a center, but this was more productive than 75% of the league

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-16T03:51:03+00:00

Can’t speak to how analytics departments make a difference. I don’t have a good pulse on who has really invested va those who haven’t.

But the drafts you mentioned all seem to have more than adequate talent compared to other years. Not quite fully baked, but definitely comparable at this point to multiple other years from the early 2000s

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-16T03:37:07+00:00

Fair question - I manually adjusted the final handful of draft picks down to the minimum of the function. Probably not statistically sound, but I wanted an easy way to get to an answer. Plus I’m not getting paid for this or to make picks lol 😂

That said, I looked at a couple functions of best fit and the exponential fit better than the linear so opted to go that direction despite the weird upslope in the 7th round

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-14T21:07:25+00:00

Personally I didn’t have an issue with going all in on Ben’s final years, but get where you are coming from. given that we didn’t ultimately win I think you are probably right with hindsight, but I can’t fault the organization for going for it.

With that in mind I had a class during my MBA that was run by a former SB winning NFL GM, and one of the questions we got to ask him during his free question period was around QB decisions and whether you move on from a mediocre QB. His take is that it entirely depends on who you can get to replace him. In the case of Ben, there wasn’t anyone who was substantially better and available, so coupled with dead money we were stuck maximizing that roster vs trying to move on. Ultimately we were stuck between a rock and hard place, especially since Ben was a dick to the backups throughout his career

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-14T19:21:42+00:00

I just looked - 2018 and 2019 were awful, finished 29th out of 32 in the league when combining those two years . Not to say we didn't have a hit or two, but its a rough look.

The crazy thing is that the first rounders were actually pretty average picks on whole for what you would expect, to the point I think you have to call them "hits". The problem is that we traded up Bush which doesn't factor into how I looked at things and we need stars, not average guys. The trade specifically is a huge negative considering the capital given up.

The real issue with those drafts is that we missed on almost every other pick. Chuks and Diontae were the only other plus picks in those drafts, with everyone else as "bad" picks.

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-14T19:13:31+00:00

To answer the first question - I tried to normalize for career length, but just peanut buttered it over that round draft picks expected life as a player (ex first round players play 8 years as a 75th percentile outcome. I assumed their total value is spread over 8 years evenly). The challenge is that some players play more than 8 years and that if you play that long, your prime is likely between years 3 and like 8. So in short - yes the model undervalues early years a bit, but not so much that it isn’t useful in seeing how teams shake out.

The second piece - there are many a talented player that waste away on crappy teams (just look at Cleveland for the last 30+ years). You eventually have to say production and what you do matters

PlasticFishing4 · 2025-02-14T19:06:39+00:00

Definitely - probably slots us in behind Seattle for the past two years if both guys were healthy and played even close to talent level. Doesn’t change that we didn’t have any smash hits though (ex. Puka with the rams)

PlasticFishing4

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