“Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” (Tom Landry)

Head coaches in the NFL are renowned for their reluctance to offer public clues about their overall strategic plans. Perhaps the slogan most closely accepted by the coaching fraternity is “Loose lips sink ships.” So the sports pundit’s job often resembles an eternal guessing game in which participants trade hunches about what might be next for the home team.

If the team you’re covering happens to be the Pittsburgh Steelers, then you’re probably chasing after what commonly are known as “Tomlinisms” — press conference quips which more often resemble Riddles of the Sphinx than serious efforts to clarify the team’s current situation.

Of course, Mike Tomlin isn’t any more guilty of this defensive practice than his fellow head coaches around the NFL. But because they keep their plans so close to the vest, fans and pundits have no choice other than making guesses (whether educated or wild) about the key elements of a head coach’s master strategy for success.

At the start of the 2023 regular season, everyone was looking forward to seeing further development and progress by a quarterback drafted in the first round the previous year. But in the wake of the recent offseason, the narrative of Kenny Pickett as heir apparent to Big Ben had been tossed out the window. So as the Steelers’ 2024 Training Camp gets underway, observers of the Black-and-gold must now attempt to divine the new strategic direction the team is following given these vastly altered circumstances.

It’s evident that the Steelers brain trust and many fans had concluded the process of Pickett’s development was moving so slowly that, unless substantial changes were made, the team might find itself locked into the same offensive pattern this season which has existed since Roethlisberger retired at the end of the 2021 season. Rather than take that gamble, the organization opted to bring in a pair of quarterbacks — one youngster and one grizzled veteran — both of them having more extensive experience as NFL starters.

These moves represent a strong vote in favor of known quantities as opposed to banking on the black box of future potential. Acquiring Justin Fields from the Bears, in addition to the wily veteran Russell Wilson from Denver, appears to offer a reasonable prospect of significant improvement this season at the all-important position.

So if we’re starting to construct a new narrative describing the Steelers’ revised strategic plan, the initial outline might be that the organization believes this combination of QB talent offers the prospect for the team to emerge from its 2024 regular season, not only on the upswing, but also with a settled situation behind Center.

Conversely, the nightmare scenario would be one in which neither Wilson nor Fields emerges as the clear leader moving forward. This would essentially place the team back in the same circumstance where they found themselves after Roethlisberger retired. So that would amount to three seasons during which, with the possible exception of rebuilding the offensive line, the team’s progress would be negligible.

There’s no denying that the team’s dramatic shift at QB must be taken to represent the centerpiece of the organization’s current plan for remaking the Steelers into a serious NFL contender and doing so without undue delay. The collapse of the Pickett experiment means that the team scarcely can afford for their new approach at QB to reach a similar dead end.

As detached from the inner workings of the front office as the fanbase might be under normal circumstances, we know even less about how this year’s Steelers are going to look once the regular season begins. Training camp and the preseason games are unlikely to provide much in terms of meaningful clues about the nature of the team we’ll be watching in games that count.

As fans, we must recognize that not all of the team’s offseason acquisitions will prove to be plug-and-play components. In fact, given the scope of the team’s offseason changes, we might not have any clear picture of the true character of this 2024 Steelers edition until October football. So many of these players will be teammates for the first time that it’s definitely going to take some time to build the level of cohesion necessary for a serious playoff contender.

Regardless of anything revealed during the offseason or the preseason, the 2024 Pittsburgh Steelers remain a largely unknown quantity. We might know all of the names but we have no idea how they will play together. That’s certainly a cause for some excitement as we look forward to watching how rookies and players brought in from other teams will fit into the mix. But it might also be a source of frustration if we harbor inflated expectations before observing the team in serious competition.

Probably the best we can do now is to recognize that we won’t start getting any meaningful clues until September. Only then will we be able to start evaluating whether the Steelers’ QB moves are bearing the widely anticipated fruit. As Coach Landry once remarked, it’s one thing to have a strategic plan but quite another to implement it successfully. And unless the Steelers can manage to get what appear to be the basic building blocks in place, it’s anyone’s guess where the team will wind up in December.