When the Pittsburgh Steelers are in the dreaded long offseason, there are plenty of ideas to debate. As part of the triumphant trio on the Steelers Preview podcast, I’ve been known to often give a “Dave answer“ to various things as I often like to argue both sides of an issue. With this in mind, a new weekly segment has been born… Unpopular opinion.

There are plenty of arguments both for and against the Pittsburgh Steelers that might not go along with the majority of fans. Oftentimes I believe in these arguments, while other times I simply like to pose a counter argument for ones that are taking it too much to the extreme. For this reason, I’m going to offer some points about the Pittsburgh Steelers that go against the general fan narrative, or at least how I have heard things.

First up is something many fans don’t want to hear at this time following a disastrous end to the season…

The Pittsburgh Steelers overachieved in 2024

When looking at the Steelers overall season for 2024, they overachieved. The Steelers won more games than they should have won. Going into the season, many sports books had the Steelers at 7.5 wins or possibly 8.5 wins. I actually placed a wager at over 9.5 wins at +220 because I wanted a much better payout. The Steelers should not have had double digit wins or have made the postseason based on these projections.

But there’s more to overachieving than just this. The Steelers were underdogs in nine regular season games this year based on the final betting lines posted on Pro Football Reference. This should have had them with a record of 8–9 based on what they should have done. But being favored to win or lose does not always equate to a teams exact record. When the Steelers were favored to win, they went 5–3 on the season where they had losses in Indianapolis where they were favored by +1, at home against the Cowboys where they were favored by +2.5 points, and a Thursday night loss in Cleveland where they were, shockingly, favored by +3.5 points. While these losses may look bad, the Steelers ultimately went 5–4 in games where they were underdogs. In fact, no team won more games as an underdog than the Steelers in 2024. There were two other teams that also won five games as an underdog, the Dallas Cowboys and Carolina Panthers, but that was the most.

So why doesn’t Steelers’ Nation feel like the Steelers overachieved this season?

The mostly likely reason for this is because they finished with the exact same record as the previous year and lost in the first round of the playoffs.

I get it. It wasn’t an improvement from the results of last year. But honestly, it’s because the Steelers overachieved in 2023 as well.

Keeping the focus on 2024, part of the reason that things didn’t feel as if the Steelers overachieved is because it occurred in the first three quarters of the season while the final quarter of the season fell in line with the expectations. The final four games of the year, the Steelers were underdogs in all four games and all four were losses. Prior to that, the Steelers were 5–0 in games they were underdogs. So the overachieving occurred from the first week of the season to just after Thanksgiving.

Of course, recency bias comes into so many things. With the Steelers losing their final four games of the season and then their playoff game, it’s hard to look back at the season as a whole and say that it was an over achievement overall. But even when the Steelers were 10–3, they still were underdogs in every remaining game of the season. And as much as fans may not want to admit it, the overachieving that took place in the first 13 games was more than the underachieving in the final four.

Breaking the season down specifically by quarters, it was in the five games following the Steelers bye week where the most overachieving occurred. With 17 games in a season, one of the quarters has to have five games instead of four, and with the Steelers bye week coming after eight games, it made sense to have those next five be the one with an extra game. Now that has been explained, let’s look at each quarter.

The first quarter of the season the Steelers went 1–0 in games they were underdogs and 2–1 games they were favored to win. Looking at it overall, the Steelers were favored to win three games and that’s how many games they won. In the second quarter, the Steelers had the exact same results going 1–0 when they were an underdog and 2–1 when they were favored to win. So for both of those quarters, the Steelers exited them with the expected record, but not necessarily against the teams they were expected to beat. Looking at the third quarter, which consisted of Week 10 through Week 14, the Steelers went 3–0 in games they were underdogs and 1–1 in games they were favored to win. So the expected record for the Steelers would have been 2–3 when ultimately the Steelers went 4–1. This was the area of the season the Steelers overachieved.

Looking specifically at those games, it was the Steelers wins over Washington, Baltimore, and Cincinnati during that stretch which ultimately gave them 10 wins for the season. The fact that Steelers went 0–4 over the final quarter of the season, four games they were projected to lose, still had them coming in with a greater win total than expected.

For these reasons, the Steelers overachieved in 2024. As for why they were overachieving by so much in the middle the season, some of those unpopular opinions will be discussed in the weeks to come.