Steelers’ 2021 schedule presents huge challenges

The Steelers shuffle off to Buffalo to face the playoff-built Bills in Week 1 of the 2021 NFL season. It doesn’t get any easier from there, either. The Steelers are facing a brutal 2021 schedule regardless of how you slice and dice it. If you believe in stats, Pittsburgh is starring at an NFL gauntlet of games that ranks as the league’s most difficult. But it’s not only the opponents the Steelers face that spell trouble. It’s the way this particular team is built for this season that could deflate all that Pittsburgh playoff optimism yet again. I’m talking about assembling the 2021 Steelers around a past-his-prime Hall of Fame quarterback named Ben Roethlisberger. At 39, Big Ben increasingly doesn’t resemble the once-mobile, nearly impossible-to-bring-down passer that has earned him HOF enshrinement. With Big Ben under center, all Pittsburgh could muster last season was a pop-gun attack built around Ben’s short, quick throws from the pocket. It literally got batted down, and the Steelers were one-and-done in the playoffs, with the Browns showing them the exit. Ouch! This year, the Steelers are betting that a revamped running game built on the back of rookie Najee Harris and road-graded by a rejuvenated offensive line offers the best chance for Ben’s swansong of a season to end successfully. But the biggest hurdle preventing such a story-book Steelers’ ending will those chapters – i.e. games -- that fall between Thanksgiving and New Years’. Far from being festive, this is precisely the pivot point where good teams rise and pretenders fall away. If past is prologue, Pittsburgh and its playoff aspirations could be in real trouble. And this was before the NFL gauntlet was extended by an additional, 17th game. It will be that much harder for Ben and the boys to keep it all together in 2021. Sure, Roethlisberger will give it everything he has on last time. We know that. We just don’t know what maximum effort from Big Ben’s depleted tank will look like – and whether it’s anything close to what it used to be. Only time – and that brutal slate of a 2021 Steelers’ schedule, will tell. Check out the podcast for much more game-by-game analysis in this highly scheduled edition of the Steelers Update Podcast. And be sure to catch Thursday morning’s column on PennLive. It will be packed with plenty of memes that perfectly capture the challenge presented by each of Steelers’ contests comprising this intriguing 2021 season.

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