Team won’t worry about playoffs yet
At 4-4, though, fans can start
Cameron Sutton watched the Oakland Raiders beat the Los Angeles Chargers on Thursday Night Football, but the Steelers third-year cornerback couldn’t tell you what that meant for his own team’s place in the AFC standings.
For the record, as you, dear reader, might already be well aware, that victory put the Raiders at 5-4, a half-game ahead of the 4-4 Steelers.
“Yeah, I don’t know all that,” Sutton said with a laugh.
Sutton also can’t rattle off the two teams who are currently ahead of his Steelers and the Raiders, holding the two AFC wild-card spots (Buffalo and Indianapolis). Steelers tight end Nick Vannett knows the Baltimore Ravens are leading the AFC North Division, but he has no idea who they’re playing this week (the Cincinnati Bengals).
With the Steelers right in the middle of the playoff hunt, and teetering on the brink of falling too far behind the Ravens in the division, the players themselves probably aren’t as brain-deep into postseason scenarios as you might be. Fans and media have the luxury of being removed enough to analyze schedules across the league, circle matchups on the calendar or predict how the standings might shift between now and Week 17. The Steelers? Not so much.
“No, because if we don’t win games, none of that matters,” linebacker T.J. Watt said. “So I think it’s all just worrying about us and what we can control, because if we don’t win games, then none of that even matters. So I don’t think we’re doing any of that at all.
“I know Baltimore’s winning the division, but I don’t know all the wild cards. We’re halfway through the season, only eight games in, so a lot of stuff can happen. This is only my third year, but I know a lot of stuff can happen from now until then, so it’s way too early to be doing any of that stuff.”
Not every player is quite as cliche as Watt in that regard. Yes, they put blinders on, to an extent. But Sutton admits he could probably name the teams leading each division, if he thought about it.
“But it’s not like I go, ‘Hey, we’re two games behind’ or whatever,” he said.
Part of Vannett’s adjustment period from Seattle to Pittsburgh has been paying more attention to AFC North scores as opposed to the NFC West. As he points out, each player is different, so tunnel vision isn’t always a uniform decision. It comes down to personal preference how much scoreboard-watching one might choose to do, or as Vannett puts it, “looking around seeing how the other guys are doing.”
“But I don’t even know who we play in two weeks, let alone who some other team’s playing this week or next week,” Vannett said. “Obviously, I know next week we play the Browns on Thursday night, but I couldn’t tell you who we play after that, and after that.”
At Cincinnati, then Browns again, at home. Of course, that’s getting way too far ahead of the “one game at a time” mindset of every team in every locker room at every level of every sport.
The only sliver of fiction in that mentality is that when he does sit down to watch another game, of course Sutton is taking mental notes on the teams he’s seeing. Even if he might not be aware of how the standings will change based on the results, his observations are on a deeper level.
“Just for the love of the game, you watch other teams,” Sutton said. “You see how teams are attacking each other around the league. Obviously, there might be certain games that come on that we might play that opponent next, or they might be in our division, or whatever the case may be.”
Combine all the years of NFL experience between Sutton, Watt and Vannett, and they’ll add up to Maurkice Pouncey’s 10 seasons in the league. To the starting center, there’s a balance to strike between handling your own business while keeping an eye on the competition.
What you can control matters most, but in the grand scheme, every game matters.
“I’ve just been playing so long — you want to win every game, don’t get me wrong, but I just know that it takes more than a couple losses, a couple wins,” Pouncey said. “You’ve got to play throughout the whole season. Now, it’s soon going to be crunch time. You start [seeing] here at the end how things are going to play out and the [playoff] pictures and divisional rounds and things like that, so guys got to really hone in, man. This time of the year, there’s no BS’ing around.”