Pittsburgh beat Atlanta 20-13 in the kind of game it was built to win, and our model bumped the Steelers to ten
Updated
The Steelers won their opener the way the Steelers win. Twenty points, a defense that allowed 13, a T.J. Watt pick-six off Cooper Rush, who was starting for Atlanta with both Michael Penix Jr. and Tua Tagovailoa sidelined, and a 41-year-old quarterback who did not give the game away. It was not pretty and it was not supposed to be. When we re-ran the season with the result in the books, Pittsburgh climbed from nine wins to ten, a 10-7 finish with a 56 percent playoff chance, and the projection got there for the same reason it did in July. A competent quarterback surrounded by talent and fronted by a nasty defense is a formula that keeps working.
Aaron Rodgers held up his end. Our model projects 4,169 yards and 21 touchdowns, essentially the summer line, but the interceptions fell from 16 to ten and the passer rating climbed from 84 to nearly 89. That is the difference between a veteran managing games and a veteran occasionally losing them, and after a 24 of 40, 223-yard afternoon with no turnovers the model leans toward the first. He does not need to be the MVP version of himself. He needs to distribute and avoid the killer mistake, and that is exactly what he did.
The surrounding talent looks better than it did in the summer. D.K. Metcalf's projection jumped from 76 catches and 907 yards to 97 catches for 1,189, a genuine number one having a number one season. Michael Pittman Jr. climbs from 57 catches to 77 for 864 yards, giving Rodgers a second reliable target he did not appear to have in July. Darnell Washington emerges as a real red zone piece at 51 catches and five scores. Jaylen Warren projects past 1,000 rushing yards with Rico Dowdle adding 450 behind him. The offense still projects a modest 334 points, 22nd in the league, but the receiving corps is deeper than the summer grade suggested and the quarterback is turning it over less.
The backbone is the defense, and it is doing exactly what it did in the summer run, only more so. Our model projects Pittsburgh allowing 298 points, fifth in the league, and the fifth-fewest yards, with nearly 50 sacks. Watt had two sacks and the interception he returned for a touchdown, and projects for 14 on the season. Alex Highsmith had two sacks of his own, and his line jumped from under eight to nearly 14. Cameron Heyward adds nine from the interior. A front that gets home from three spots turns close games into wins by manufacturing the one stop that flips a possession, and against Atlanta that is precisely what happened.
The one honest caveat is the secondary. Darius Slay is gone, the back end leans on the pass rush to bail it out, and a 16th-ranked grade in July has not changed. When the front gets home the coverage does not have to hold. When it does not, there will be plays surrendered, and the six division games against Burrow and Jackson will test that more than Atlanta did.
That division is the reason ten wins does not come with a division title attached. Baltimore scored 41 in Indianapolis and our model moved the Ravens from nine wins to eleven. Cincinnati beat Tampa Bay and holds at twelve. The AFC North now projects as two teams at eleven or better and Pittsburgh a step behind, and when we ran the rest of the season the Steelers were a wild card far more often than a champion. Ten wins in this division is a very good season. It is not the top of it.
The market opened Pittsburgh around eight wins, and in July our model sat just above it. Now we sit two clear of it, and the lean is grounded in a defense that just held an opponent to 13 and scored a touchdown of its own, and a quarterback who just proved he can still run one without giving it away. The path to being wrong is stitched into Rodgers's birth certificate, as it was in the summer. If he misses time, the offense falls off a cliff and a top-five defense is left grinding out games in the teens. That risk did not go anywhere. It just did not show up in Week 1.
The next month is the AFC North in miniature. Pittsburgh goes to New England in Week 2 against a defense our model grades in the top ten and a quarterback coming off three interceptions, then hosts Cincinnati in Week 3 in the first game that decides the division, then travels to Cleveland and hosts Indianapolis. When we ran that stretch, the Steelers were favored in three of the four and a coin flip against the Bengals, which is a 3-1 month and a 4-1 record entering October. The Cincinnati game is the one that separates a wild card from a division race. Win it at home and the ten-win projection has a division title attached. Lose it and the Steelers are chasing two teams.
So the read is the same read with one more win attached. Pittsburgh is a hard-nosed, defense-first team built for the margins, and the margins fell its way in the opener the way our model expects them to fall its way most weeks. Ten wins, a wild card, and a pass rush nobody in the division wants to see in January. The bet on Rodgers still looks like a smart one.
