Pecyna: Steelers season can wait

It is foolish to gauge performance based on a single game. But Sunday’s 16-9 Steelers loss to the Titans confirms one credo: It’s still not football season in Pittsburgh.

The calendar tells us hockey is still a week from preseason play and slightly a month away from officially commencing. Furthermore, the Penguins are virtually unchanged since their postseason heartbreak last year. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up in the air, but it’s not time to ponder that. 

This is an iconoclastic stance, pushing aside the Steelers in the fall and not focusing on the Pens for the time being, but I think the city ought to be more focused on the Pirates this year. Unfortunately, the Bucs were demolished in St. Louis the past three games and relinquished the division lead in the process.

There are just 20 games remaining in the Pirates’ regular season, none of which will come against the Cardinals. On the series for the year, though, Pittsburgh bested St. Louis in 10 of 19 contests.

It’s been a similar story for the Pirates’ record against the Reds, who are merely a game behind them in the standings. And of those final 20 Pirates games, 30 percent are against Cincinnati, including the last three at Great American Ballpark from Sept. 27 to 29.

Now take a peek at the Steelers’ upcoming matchups: the Bengals, the Bears and the Vikings. Are any of those contests being touted as a Super Bowl preview? Sure, the game against Cincinnati’s lesser pro team is a Monday Night Football telecast. Chicago is a Sunday-night national broadcast on NBC. Fans are treated to watching Adrian Peterson when Pittsburgh is in Minnesota. But none of these is noteworthy for reasons pertinent to the Steelers’ success.

Now extrapolate that across the first half of Pittsburgh’s football season. With the exception of an Oct. 20 contest at home against Baltimore, nothing jumps off the schedule as a headliner in the first eight weeks.

Consider that the MLB postseason schedule has the National League Championship series ending just before that game against the Ravens, further entrenching it as the most compelling undertaking the Steelers encounter in the first half of the 2013 campaign.

The next three Steelers games fall on dates that also host Pirates games. One such date is Sept. 29, when Pittsburgh’s football team faces Peterson and the Vikings and the baseball contingent ends its regular season — and perhaps its possible postseason chances, too — in Cincinnati.

The disparity in importance of schedule is epitomized on Oct. 27. The late-fall day features game four of the World Series, a possible clinching match. Oh, and of course the Steelers-Raiders “battle.”

This isn’t to say that the Pirates are going to be clinching the World Series that day, or that they’ll be in the World Series or the postseason at all. Rather, it’s a commentary on the irrelevance of the first eight weeks of the Steelers’ football season.

It’s a reminder that the remainder of the Pirates’ schedule — to be played out in 21 days — outnumbers the games the Steelers will play — with moderate success, possibly — over the next four months.

With the Steelers failing to surpass 250 yards of offense against Tennessee on Sunday, all while losing Pro Bowl center Maurkice Pouncey and linebacker Larry Foote possibly for the whole season, the season outlook dims a bit more.

The same can be said of the weekend sweep the Pirates endured at the hands of St. Louis, but they are a near lock for a postseason berth – evidenced by Baseball Prospectus pegging the odds of a playoff appearance at 99.8 percent for the Bucs.

As September winds down, prioritize the attention given to Pittsburgh’s teams: The Pirates are fighting for a playoff spot while the Steelers seem likely to be fighting for a better pick in next year’s draft.