As of now, is 2019 the worst year of the 21st century for Pittsburgh sports fans?

By: Joe Smeltzer 

That just about sums it up.

The Steelers got embarrassed on opening night in New England because the whole team stunk.

One week later, they lost their home opener to the Seahawks largely because the defense wasn’t good enough.

Pittsburgh’s week three disappointment happened largely because of an offense that couldn’t make the most of five San Francisco 49ers turnovers.

Offensive guard David DeCastro told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“I feel sick for the defense.”

The good thing about this quote is that it shows that although the Steelers are lacking in overall talent compared to the past five years, at least one of their leaders knows that times are crappy. The bad thing about it is that, well, times are crappy. Beyond that, we are only through three games and the Steelers are already finding multiple ways to lose.

The mess that Pittsburgh sports are turning into goes beyond its football team. The past week and ½ has been atrocious for the entire city.

Hell, Ben Roethlisberger’s season ending surgery somehow wasn’t the most depressing news of the week.

The Steelers, Penguins and Pirates are all underwhelming at the moment, as are Pitt football and basketball. To me, this begs a legitimate question of whether Pittsburgh sports have been this low at any point in the 21^st century.

I threw out this query on my twitter account hours after the world found out that Felipe Vazquez had been arrested.

To determine whether or not 2019 is the worst year for Pittsburgh sports since Y2K, I’ve decided to break down the past eight months as well as all the 19 years that preceded them.

This year isn’t over yet, but for now, let’s see how it stacks up against the past

2019: Let’s try to condense this.

·      Both Antonio Brown and the Pirates have had enough nonsense to warrant separate articles.

·      Ben Roethlisberger’s season was supposed to be filled with touchdowns and void of drama. Instead, it ended after two games.

·      Pitt basketball is on the rise under Jeff Capel, but is still a bottom-tier ACC program.

·      Pitt football is the same as it always is.

·      Yes, I know Pitt volleyball is very good. No, I do not care.

·      The Penguins have been in decline since 2017 and have lost their last six playoff games. Yet our city sees them as its only hope for a pride. Doesn’t that sum up where we are?

To get a better idea of how bad this year is, let’s turn back the clock a bit.

1999: The Steelers went 7-9 and missed the playoffs. The Pirates’ catcher and franchise player, Jason Kendall, broke his ankle on independence day and was never the same. The early part of the year was met with fear of the Penguins future in Pittsburgh. Pitt basketball was a well-established joke under Ralph Willard, and the school hired Ben Howland to pick up the pieces.

The last year of the 20^th century also marked the end of Pitt Stadium, and the cries for another on-campus field have been heard from here to Bangor, Maine ever since.

2000: The first year of Century #21 wasn’t a great one, but it was salvaged right at the finish line by the return of Mario Lemieux to the NHL Dec. 26. Lemieux’s return alone puts 2000 ahead of 2019, and “Le Magnifique” delivered, scoring 76 points and 43 games to show that he hadn’t lost a step after three years of retirement

2001: PNC Park and Heinz Field opened, and the Steelers christened their new stadium with a 13-3 season that ended one game shy of the Super Bowl. The Penguins rode a resurrected Mario to the Eastern Conference finals. Overall, it wasn’t a bad year, aside from the Pirates losing 100 games and subsequently raising ticket prices.

2002: Thanks to an NFL castoff turned XFL legend named Tommy Maddox, the Steelers won their second straight division title. The Pirates improved from 2001, winning 72 games. On the downside, The Penguins downward spiral began with them missing the postseason for the first of four consecutive seasons. Although the Pens stunk, Pitt basketball didn’t. The 2000s Panthers had the first of what would become many dominant seasons in the Big East, going 29-6 and making it to the Sweet 16.

2002 wasn’t a year becoming of a “City of Champions,” but it was a hell of a lot better than 2019.

2003: This is a year that’s in the running the worst in recent memory, at least on the professional side. The Steelers went 6-10, and haven’t sucked as bad since. The Pirates had another sub-par season lowlighted by the horrendous Aramis Ramirez trade. The Penguins missed the playoffs again amid increasingly dwindling attendance in an outdated arena that everybody knew they needed to leave.

What saved 2003 was college athletics. Pitt’s Larry Fitzgerald had one of the most successful seasons of any local athlete ever, wrapping up several awards and narrowly missing out on the Heisman Trophy. Pitt basketball continued to win under Howlad, taking home gold in the glamorous Big East tournament and making another Sweet 16. Today, neither Pitt football or basketball is good, and for that, I say 2003 was slightly better than 2019. But it’s a close race.

2004: The Penguins and Pirates still stunk, nut Pitt basketball was better than ever, going 31-5 under first year head coach Jamie Dixon and winning the Big East regular season championship. Pitt football also won a conference championship, and God knows when that will happen again.

Perhaps most notably, the Steelers went 15-1, led by a young, punk kid from Lima, Ohio who would become a Steel City institution.

2005: A Super Bowl season. That’s all you need to know. Well, the Penguins won the NHL draft lottery and drafted Sidney Crosby. That’s worth mentioning too.

2006: All in all, 2006 was lousy. But, the Steelers Super Bowl win happened in February, and Pittsburgh hosted its first MLB All-Star game in 12 years five months later. Crosby broke 100 points in his rookie season, and Freddy Sanchez won the National League batting crown.

2007: The Mike Tomlin era began for the Steelers, and the Jim Tracy era ended for the Pirates. The Penguins made their first of 13 (and hopefully counting) consecutive playoff appearances, and Pitt football pulled off one of the biggest upsets in college football history in its legendary 13-9 win over West Virginia.

2008: Crosby and the Pens fell two wins short of the Stanley Cup. Pitt football churned out an 8-4 campaign under Dave Wannstedt. The Steelers were also pretty good that year, which leads us to…

2009: Super Bowl. Stanley Cup. I could stop there, but I won’t. Andrew McCutchen made his MLB debut, and Pitt basketball fell one game short of its first Final Four. Life was good for a Pittsburgh sports fans 10 years ago. What the hell happened?

2010: The Penguins closed out the Mellon Arena with another solid campaign, though it didn’t conclude with a trip to the Stanley Cup, but rather a quarterfinal defeat in seven games to Montreal. The Steelers overcome a four-game suspension hammered down to Roethlisberger to get to another Super Bowl.  Pitt fired Wannstedt, and the Pirates fired manager John Russell. One of those decisions worked out significantly better than the other.

2011: The Pirates reached first place in July, giving this city hope for half a summer. The Steelers turned in another 12-4 season, and the Penguins had what may have been a great year stolen from them when Crosby went down at Heinz Field on New Year’s Day. All three professional sports teams did well, which would become a brief trend later in the 2010s. On the college scene, Pitt earned a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament for the second time in three years, but lost in outrageous fashion to Butler in the second round, a defeat the program has yet to recover from.

2012: This is another candidate for worst year of the 21^st century, starting with Tim Tebow knocking the Steelers out of the postseason in January.  The Pirates had one of the worst collapses in baseball history. The 2012 Steelers limped to an 8-8 finish, missing the playoffs for just the second time under Tomlin. The Penguins embarrassed themselves in a six-game series loss to the Flyers in the first round.

In college sports, Pitt basketball had its worst season in more than a decade, settling for a dubious CBI championship. 2012 wasn’t good at all, but was it worse than 2019? Because McCutchen officially became a superstar, and Crosby returned from the concussion that put his career in question, I put this year slightly ahead of 2019, for now.

2013: The Pirates played in six playoff games. Hell of a year.

2014: All three professional teams qualified for the postseason. That doesn’t happen often.

2015: The Pirates won 98 games. The Steelers and Penguins also put playoff seasons together, albeit the Pens’ run only lasted five games. Who knows when we’ll see all three teams qualify for the postseason again? Only God.

2016: Lord Stanley Returns.

2017: See above

2018: The Steelers choked. AB became a joke. The Pirates traded away McCutchen and Gerrit Cole and acquired Chris Archer six months later. The Washington Capitals finally vanquished the Penguins when it mattered. There were a lot of bad things that came out of 2018, but I don’t see how it tops the crap we’re currently walking through.

So, all years have good and bad things that happen to a city and its sports fans. But after breaking down this list, I’m still convinced that never in my life as a Pittsburgh native has it been harder to find positives than it has been in 2019. Plenty of justifiable answers can be given as to why this year is or isn’t the worst stretch of Pittsburgh sports in the 21^st century. My answer is, unless something drastically changes, it will be the worst.