Friday Football Footnotes: Tim Benz's season predictions
If you work in the Pittsburgh sports media you are obligated — by law — to make a season prediction for the Steelers before their first game of the regular season.
Seriously. If you don’t, you could get arrested. I’m pretty sure I signed some piece of paper requiring me to do so when I first got here in 2001.
It doesn’t matter if you are a Steelers beat writer, a TV anchor, or somebody who used to cover the Pittsburgh Triangles in 1975. You have to make a Steelers prediction. And I am not above the law!
So, what you are about to read is nothing that I haven’t already stated on the radio, television, in print here at “Breakfast With Benz,” or on our podcasts a million times over.
But I figured I should just consolidate it here. Post it. Make it easily memorable and accessible so that way when my predictions go tragically wrong, you can send me this link and mock me for being way off.
Or, I can hyperlink it in every Steelers story I write between the end of this season and the start of the next one to remind you how masterful my powers of fortune telling and prognostication truly are.
Or we could both forget I ever filed this story and move on with our lives.
Either way, for “Friday Football Footnotes” this week, here is how I see the Steelers season playing out.
• The Steelers will go 10-7 and make the playoffs as an AFC wild-card team.
Like many Steelers fans, I think the team will be better in 2023 than it was last year. Everything they have done in training camp and the preseason has underscored the reasons why I first made that prediction in the spring. So I’m not going to adjust my prediction to be even higher simply because they are living up to the expectations that I set a long time ago.
That’s why I think some of the 12- and 13-win projections with an AFC North Division title are kooky.
While improving, I don’t think the Steelers have gotten good enough that they are quite elite. Twelve or 13 wins in a deep AFC would be elite in my estimation.
• The Cincinnati Bengals will win the AFC North again at 11-6. The Steelers will be third at 10-7 behind them and the Baltimore Ravens, who will also wrap up 2023 at 10-7. The Browns will finish fourth at 8-9.
• The Kansas City Chiefs will win the AFC West at 12-5 and get the lone bye in the AFC playoff bracket. The Jacksonville Jaguars will take advantage of playing the hideous AFC South — and facing the even worse NFC South — and win 12 games to be the AFC’s second seed.
The Bengals will win the North as the third seed. The Bills will struggle more than in recent years but will still win 10 games and claim the AFC East as the fourth seed.
The Ravens will be the top wild card by way of a tiebreaker over the Steelers. The last wild card will go to the New York Jets at 9-8 by way of a tiebreaker over the typically disappointing Los Angeles Chargers.
• That means the Steelers will go to Cincinnati in a 3-6 first-round playoff matchup. After splitting with the Bengals in the regular season, they will lose that game.
• The Bengals will emerge from the AFC but lose the Super Bowl for the second time in three years. This time, to the Philadelphia Eagles.
• It will be horrible to watch Philadelphia bask in Super Bowl glory for the second time in seven seasons. But all of Pittsburgh will rationalize that result by saying, “Hey, at least it wasn’t the Flyers winnin’ da’ Cup. Yinz know what I mean?”
• The Flyers will not win the Stanley Cup. I might be wrong about everything else I just wrote. I know that I’ll get this one right.
