The NFL trade deadline came and went on Tuesday without the Steelers making any moves to improve their chances at winning a seventh Lombardi trophy.

LMAO!

Sorry, I had to laugh at the very notion of the Steelers being buyers in 2023 as if a major move was ever going to make them a serious contender.

We heard the talk and engaged in the debates in the days prior to the NFL’s trade deadline. We can thank the league and its desire to make every aspect of its calendar year seem more important than it actually is. Let me tell you something, a deadline trade in football isn’t nearly as impactful as the deadline deals that often occur in the NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball.

Football is the ultimate team sport, meaning, one guy isn’t going to make that much of a difference. OK, maybe, maybe if that guy was traded to a legit contender with one glaring weakness on its roster, you might have a reason to get excited about it.

The 2023 Steelers don’t have one glaring weakness; they have many, and they are great.

Have you seen the stats? Pittsburgh is 30th in both offense and defense through seven games. The team is averaging 16.1 points per contest; that number drops to 13.8 when you erase two defensive touchdowns and a safety.

That’s right, the offense is awful, which is something that we all know, but this defense is incredibly inconsistent, and to call it elite would be an insult to the word.

With all of that in mind, that brings me back to my LMAO! Remember those rumors on Tuesday afternoon that Pittsburgh was the frontrunner to land Jaylon Johnson, the cornerback from the Bears? In fact, the deal almost seemed done at one point.

It never happened. Boo…I guess. Question: Is Johnson a game-wrecker on par with Rod Woodson? Maybe then, he might have made a difference for this Steelers team, but only maybe. The same goes for the hypothetical discussions involving Patrick Surtain II, the talented, young cornerback for the Broncos.

The same goes for any other player at any other position.

Omar Khan, along with his Robin, Andy Weidl, made a ton of praise-worthy deals during the offseason. To reiterate the ongoing theme of this article: Those moves haven’t improved the Steelers one bit. Allen Robinson hasn’t made the receiving corps any better. Patrick Peterson has made the secondary worse. Desmond King was released. Even Isaac Seumalo, the star acquisition of the offseason, has been a major disappointment for an offensive line that is still pretty pathetic despite a massive rebuild that began when Kevin Colbert was still the foreman.

Let me get this straight: Numerous offseason moves couldn’t put the Steelers over the hump from mediocrity to even respectability, but one trade at the deadline was going to suddenly make them a contender?

Get the hell out of here! To quote head coach Mike Tomlin: What the bleep is wrong with y’all, today?

The Steelers might be 4-3 and in the “thick” of the playoff race, but as the football kids now say, they are a fraud–that last word doesn’t need to be surrounded by quotation marks, btw.

But you wanted the Steelers to make a deal at the deadline, which I kind of get. You wanted the same adrenaline rush that you often enjoyed during the offseason when Omar was cooking and eating as the Khan Artist. I don’t blame you in one sense because you need to get your football fix from somewhere, and it certainly hasn’t been coming from any 100-yard fields your football team has been playing on this year.

Those offseason moves gave Steelers fans a chance to dream. Unfortunately, the regular season has been nothing but a nightmare up to this point.

A huge deadline move may have given you yet another reason to fantasize, but fantasies aren’t real.

These 2023 Pittsburgh Steelers and their plethora of problems are.

Jaylon Johnson or Patrick Surtain could have rushed out of that tunnel at Acrisure Stadium donned in black and gold, but it wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

The Steelers need to keep as many draft picks as they can because they’re going to need them to continue to address the many glaring problems that one deadline deal was never going to.