Art Rooney II has no interest in rebuilding, ever
Most owners will say they want to compete to win a Super Bowl every year. For most of those owners, it's something they feel like they have to say in order to keep the fan base fully prepared to renew season tickets and to show up for games and buy a bunch of overpriced stuff.
In Pittsburgh, they mean it. To a fault.
The Steelers are never willing to strategically take a step back in the short term, in the hopes of laying the foundation for a Super Bowl team. Owner Art Rooney II wants to win it all, every year.
Near the end of Wednesday's press conference with reporters, Rooney said of the "rebuild" term, "I don't like that word that much. We'll try to compete Day One [with our next coach] if we can."
Put simply, the concept of accepting a lost season is lost on Rooney.
"I'm not sure why you waste a year of your life not trying to contend," Rooney said earlier in the 15-minute session. "Obviously, your roster is what it is every year. It changes every year, and so you deal with, you know, what you have every year and try to put yourself in position to compete every year. And sometimes you have the horses, sometimes you don't, but I think you try every year."
He later made it abundantly clear: "The standard is try to compete to win a championship every year."
"I'm not going to say, 'Well, you know, we're going to take a couple of years to figure this out and then we'll try to compete,'" Rooney said. "So I think you try every year. And as I said, some years you have the horses to really get there. Some years you don't. But you try every year, in my view."
Basically, if the Steelers are ever going to bottom out to the point that they get a prime choice of incoming players, it'll happen despite their best efforts to avoid that outcome. Which is what led to the ability to draft Hall of Fame defensive tackle Joe Greene in 1969 and Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw in 1970.
Which means that, when it comes to drafting, they'll need years more like 1974, when they had the twenty-first pick in round one and ultimately engineered a class that included Hall of Fame receiver Lynn Swann (first round), Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert (second round, 46th overall), Hall of Fame receiver John Stallworth (second round, 82nd overall), Hall of Fame center Mike Webster (fifth round, 125th overall), and Hall of Fame safety Donnie Shell — who went undrafted through 17 rounds.
For now, the Steelers' roster has plenty of holes. And they'll need, among other things, a long-term answer at the quarterback position.
Lately, since the failure of 2022 first-rounder Kenny Pickett, the Steelers have opted for veteran Band-Aids at quarterback. In 2024, it was Russell Wilson and Justin Fields. In 2025, it was Aaron Rodgers. In 2026, they'll need someone who can counter the fact that the Ravens have Lamar Jackson and the Bengals have Joe Burrow.
Really, if the Deshaun Watson experiment had worked out for the Browns, the Steelers may have been left in the dust by their division rivals. Moving forward, with Baltimore and Cleveland also hiring new coaches in the current cycle, the risk for Pittsburgh is that the wrong move could spark the kind of chronic down cycle the Steelers haven't seen since the 1960s.
Which, despite the short-term pain, laid the foundation for a decade of dominance.
