My brother contacts me all the time about the Steelers. He’s a fanatic. He lives and dies for them.

Many of my brother’s phone calls and/or text messages start something like this: “So, what do you think?” He’s obviously talking about the upcoming game in most cases, but sometimes, it’s about drama that has nothing to do with the next contest.

There doesn’t even have to be an upcoming game; it may be the middle of the offseason, and he could be asking me what I think about a certain player skipping OTAs. Maybe he’s reaching out to me regarding a rumor involving a free agent Pittsburgh may or may not be interested in. Perhaps he’s texting me about what a certain Steelers player said on a podcast or social media.

It could be about an ongoing Steelers season but not necessarily about football.

Not long ago, I was listening to local sports talk radio while driving, and the hosts were talking about the possibility of Ben Roethlisberger becoming the Steelers’ next offensive coordinator or at least an offensive consultant. I immediately said, “This is stupid,” and I turned the radio off. Not a second later, my brother called me to ask me what I thought of this possibility.

I said, “Holy hell, what is it with you guys and these silly topics? It’s not grounded in any sort of reality. Roethlisberger is never, ever going to be the Steelers offensive coordinator.”

I mentioned something about him and other Steelers fans being in serious need of a second hobby, that they were concerning themselves with things that had very little to do with actual football and the outcomes of games.

He said, “Hey, you have to remember, football is like a soap opera for fanatics.” And I said, “Yeah, and if the Steelers were a soap opera, they’d be called The Young and the Scoreless.”

That’s really the problem here. It’s not that Steelers fans are so obsessed with the team that they care about silly stuff like sideline arguments or whether or not Matt Canada had been secretly demoted because he didn’t celebrate during a late-game touchdown. It’s that the Steelers haven’t given their fans nearly enough bang for their buck in recent years.

We spend all offseason talking about the Steelers and dissecting every little move and rumor, only for them to put a product on the field that has become increasingly more boring and stale over the past five years.

Furthermore, the team hasn’t exactly been getting it done with boring football. There hasn’t been a playoff victory to celebrate since January of 2017. The truly negative fans used to give other Steelers faithful a hard time for celebrating division titles, but Pittsburgh has only won one of those since 2018. Playoff appearances have now turned into a 50/50 proposition every year.

In the absence of an exciting product and/or playoff success, fans have to focus on and obsess over other nonsense.

Maybe this obsession over things other than results has nothing to do with an offense that can’t score 20 points unless the defense helps with its own little tush push. It could be that we’re just drunk on all things football, and everything gets put under the spotlight all the time in this new social media age that needs content and needs it all the time.

For example, effort-gate. I’m talking about Diontae Johnson and his failure to give a damn after running back Jaylen Warren fumbled early in the game vs. the Bengals last Sunday. I won’t go into much detail about it. After all, how could you not know every little thing about what transpired on that play? I’d be lying to you if I said this wouldn’t have been a big deal 25 years ago. It would have been, but would it be the top story for an entire week–especially after a win that improved the team to 7-4?

That was a rhetorical question because it wouldn’t have been.

I’m not saying what Johnson did wasn’t a bad look, but was it bad enough that we have to obsess over it for days and days?

That was a rhetorical question because I don’t think so.

“But it sets a bad example for his teammates!” you might insist. Yes, it does set a bad example. Fumbling also sets a bad example, but I think most professional football players are smart enough to know that there will be consequences if they do it enough times.

Johnson knows what he did was wrong. He realizes he let his teammates down. His teammates know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. That should be the end of it.

Yet, so many fans and media members want Johnson to be benched over that incident. Why? So the offense could be even worse? Come on. This isn’t high school football, and you’re not Diontae Johnson’s parent. You shouldn’t give one frick about whether or not he gets benched. You should want him out there. He might not be great, but he’s good, and the Steelers need all the good weapons they can throw at opposing defenses these days.

I’ve heard people suggest that Johnson should be benched for one play or three. Maybe he should be “benched” for the player introductions this Sunday at Acrisure Stadium.

That sure would make me feel better.

Now that I think about it, maybe the Johnson saga would have been a huge deal even during a legit Super Bowl run. After all, Antonio Brown got into a ton of hot water over the fact that he was on Facebook Live during Mike Tomlin’s post-game locker room speech that followed the Steelers’ last postseason victory seven seasons ago.

Despite the fact that Pittsburgh advanced to the AFC Championship Game with the win, we spent an entire week focusing on Brown’s locker room antics. If I remember correctly, Brown even had to address the incident during a special press conference held about, well, the incident.

We still talk about it today, but if I had to wager a guess as to why, it’s because the Steelers were blown out by New England in the AFC title game and haven’t won in the postseason since.

And that brings me back to why we’re so focused on things that don’t involve actual football. This is why we all danced in the streets when word came down that Canada was fired as offensive coordinator last week. The fans are starving for some playoff success. They’re starving for a postseason run. They miss having Super Bowls to realistically fantasize about.

Truth is, we would still be talking about the Steelers all the gosh darn time in this social media age that craves content morning, noon and night. However, we’d likely be way more focused on the football stuff if the team was giving us a much better and more exciting product.

Yes, the Steelers are a soap opera, but they’re one with a satirical name these days.

If the Steelers were a soap opera, they’d be the Daze of our Lives. They would be The Hold and the Horrible.

The Steelers need to start performing in such a way that their fans can focus on that and not on drama that is only drama because good football is missing.

Otherwise, I’ll probably be writing about some silly non-football drama seven years from now and using effort-gate as an example of something Steelers fans once cared way too much about.