Most Disappointing Team
Allen: Pittsburgh Steelers
How easy was the AFC North schedule last season? The Cleveland Browns won 7 games. The Steelers are a decent football team but the entire AFC North benefitted last year from playing both the AFC and NFC South. Even with cupcake wins against the Jaguars, Titans, Falcons and Panthers the Steelers still managed to lose to the Bucs, Jets and Saints last year. This year the Steelers will have to face the Patriots, Chiefs, Broncos, Chargers, Colts and Cardinals. Yikes. That’s the toughest schedule in the NFL. It’s backslide time for Pittsburgh.
Dyce: Pittsburgh Steelers
Everyone is high on the Steelers offense, and rightfully so, they have weapons like Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell. The bigger issue is their lack of a coherent defense which will make them resemble the underachieving Dallas Cowboys teams of year’s past.
Bass: Cincinnati Bengals
Andy Dalton is at a similar crossroad to where division foe Joe Flacco stood a few years prior: a quarterback tiptoeing the elite/overrated line. Unfortunately for Dalton, he won’t go on a playoff heater and take his team to the Super Bowl. He won’t even get the Bengals to the playoffs. Cincinnati finishes below .500 for the first time since 2010, and while it won’t cost Marvin Lewis his job, an unsatisfied fan base will look over at Minnesota and grumble that the man who should be their coach is doing big things with the Vikings.
Hill: Dallas Cowboys
Last year wasn’t a total fluke, but it’s not something that Cowboys fans should get used to. There hasn’t been a more consistently inconsistent team over the last decade than the Tony Romo-led Cowboys. It seems they play to the death in the final week of the season for a playoff berth, then get gifted for persistence with a solid season every so often. DeMarco Murray is gone, they have no running game and fans will be find out the hard way that indeed not anyone can run behind their offensive line — mainly because none of the backs they have can run at all.
Jorgensen: Not to beat the dead horse here, but the Pittsburgh Steelers.
You can have all the offensive firepower in this league, but the fact is that you have to stop your opponent and the Steelers just don’t have the defense right now to do that week in and week out. They’ll have their moments here and there on offense, but it would not shock me if the lackluster defense kept them away from the postseason .
Verderame: Pittsburgh Steelers
Pittsburgh has one of the worst defenses in the league, if not the worst. The Steelers are also going from playing the AFC and NFC South divisions to the Western divisions. Good luck with that. Combine those problems with the loss of Maurkice Pouncey for two months and the suspensions of Le’Veon Bell and Martavis Bryant, and this team has 7-9 written all over it.
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