Rodgers Just Tied Manning. His Team Is Coming Apart Around Him.
There is a version of this Pittsburgh season that looks like a success story. Aaron Rodgers, in the acknowledged final chapter of a career that will end in Canton, tied Peyton Manning on the all-time passing touchdown list last Sunday — 539 and counting, delivered in overtime, in a win. The Steelers are 4-2, sitting in a playoff spot, riding a two-game winning streak. From a distance, this is a contender doing contender things.
Get closer and the picture changes. I wrote two days ago about what that overtime win actually revealed — a head coach spending halftime in a medical tent with an ankle injury instead of addressing his team at the break, a franchise grinding out results through sheer will rather than structural health. What's happened since hasn't softened that read. It has confirmed it. Michael Pittman Jr. is out. Roman Wilson just went to injured reserve with a finger injury — the second key receiver lost in as many weeks. The organizational response was to sign Marquez Valdes-Scantling, a veteran reclamation project, because that is what the market offers when your depth has been stripped to the bone. The depth chart at wide receiver now lists Ben Skowronek, Brandon Smith, and Brandon Johnson. That is not a receiving corps built to win a Super Bowl. That is a group assembled to survive.
This is the part of the column where I name comparable situations, because history is instructive here. Contenders operating with a depleted skill position group around an aging quarterback at the end of his window tend to follow one of two paths. The ones who survive it — the late-career Brady teams in New England come to mind, or the Peyton Manning Broncos in 2015 — do so because their defense is dominant enough to carry the offensive limitations. The ones who don't — and there are more of those — get exposed in January, when margins tighten and the opponent's preparation time increases. Pittsburgh's defense has pieces: Payton Wilson has been a force at linebacker, and the pass rush has shown up at moments. But Alex Highsmith is questionable, Sebastian Joseph-Day is questionable, and the cornerback situation has been a running crisis since training camp. This defense is not the 2015 Denver unit. It is not built to compensate for a broken receiver room.
The numbers that matter most here are not Rodgers' milestone. They are Jaylen Warren's: 477 rushing yards and a dual-threat workload that has made him the offensive engine by default, and a foot injury to Rico Dowdle that means Warren is doing it largely alone. Darnell Washington has been a reliable outlet with 161 yards and two touchdowns, and Pat Freiermuth has contributed four scoring catches. But those are tight end and running back production lines. When a team's most reliable passing game contributors are its tight end and its running back in the flat, the wide receiver room has functionally collapsed. That is where Pittsburgh is right now.
My declaration is this: the Steelers will make the playoffs. At 4-2 with 11 games left and a point differential that has actually been positive this season — a meaningful improvement over last year's efficiency gap — they have enough structural advantage to get there. But they will not win a Super Bowl this year, and the reason is already visible. Rodgers is finishing his career in a building that is slowly losing its walls. The coach couldn't make it to the locker room at halftime. The receivers are on IR or signed off the street. The window that Pittsburgh opened for this final run is closing faster than anyone planned, and the team running through it looks increasingly like it's sprinting on borrowed time rather than sustainable construction. The history of this situation is not kind. The 2026 Steelers are writing a chapter that has been written before, and it rarely ends the way the quarterback deserves.