Pittsburgh Steelers 2026: The Coverage Report — 27th in volume, and the cutdown board was wrong about the rookies
Across the league our database holds 20,520 team-tagged takes, an average of 641 per club and a median of 639. The Pittsburgh Steelers have 488 — 27th of 32 teams, about 24 percent below the league average. Only the Cardinals (466), Titans (457), Panthers (448), Colts (388) and Falcons (351) drew less attention. For scale, the Bills drew 1,050.
That is genuinely light for a club that went 10-7 and made the playoffs in each of the last three seasons, per our team page for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and that opens 2026 with Aaron Rodgers, Mike McCarthy and a four-quarterback room.
But volume is not the whole picture. Of those 488 takes, 223 have been graded — 16th in the league, dead middle. Pittsburgh's takes convert to grades at 45.7 percent against a league rate of 38.7 percent. Fewer people wrote about the Steelers, and the ones who did wrote more checkable things: roster spots, playoff berths, draft slots, win totals. Less noise per column inch.
The graded body averages 64.5 accuracy and a +15.4 MissedTakes Score — better than a naive baseline, unspectacular.
The cutdown: 27 hits, 9 misses, 17 still pending
Roster-spot calls are the series' news hook, and Pittsburgh has 53 of them in the database. Thirty-six are graded: 27 hits, 9 misses. Seventeen have not been graded yet, so this is a partial verdict, and one built on a modest sample. Pittsburgh's roster-spot accuracy of 75.0 sits well under the league-wide roster-spot mark of 88.4 across 1,202 graded calls, though the skill score (+19.4) edges the league's +16.5 — the Steelers' correct calls were harder ones.
The consensus was wrong about the young players it wrote off.
Seventh-round running back Eli Heidenreich drew three separate calls against him and made the 53 anyway. Nathan Jahnke wrote it twice for PFF — *"It is highly unlikely that seventh-round rookie Eli Heidenreich makes the roster"* on August 28 and again on August 30 — and back in May, Gerry Dulac had him as a practice-squad body: *"I think he's a has a chance to be a practice squad guy for sure."* All three graded 0.
Jahnke also had 2025 third-rounder Kaleb Johnson buried on August 16 — *"playing well behind both Travis Homer and Lew Nichols, making it seem very unlikely Johnson makes the 53-man roster"* — 0 accuracy, −200 skill. Safety Darnell Savage got the same treatment from Walt on August 7 (*"There's a better possibility that Savage won't even make the final 53-man roster"*): 0 and −200. Noah Strackbein expected Will Howard to clear waivers and land on the practice squad after a rough Jets game. Howard made the 53.
The people who called the surprises right. The scoring baseline assumes a player who was on somebody's 53 last season makes one again, so calls on players with no prior 53 are the ones that pay. Third-round rookie Drew Allar was the big one, and five pundits banked +200 for putting him on the roster: Jack Markowski on August 11 (*"a lock to make the 53-man roster as the No. 3 quarterback"*), Kevin Patra and Eric Edholm on August 12, Dulac on August 21, and Bryan DeArdo on August 26.
Markowski's August 15 column on three players who sealed spots against Green Bay was the sharpest single piece in the file: safety Robert Spears-Jennings (*"nearly impossible to foresee a world where Pittsburgh doesn't include Spears-Jennings on its 53-man roster"*) and fullback Riley Nowakowski both graded 100 with +200 skill, and tight end Robert Tonyan hit as well. Add returner Kaden Wetjen on August 26, another +200. Markowski is 8-for-8 on graded Steelers roster calls — 100 accuracy, 100 MissedTakes Score. That record is flagged provisional on his page and it should be: eight calls on one team is not a track record, it's a good month.
Strackbein's six-receiver projection — Metcalf, Pittman, Wilson, Bernard, Skowronek, Wetjen — went six-for-six, with Germie Bernard and Wetjen worth +200 each. Set against the Howard whiff, his Steelers roster-spot line is 85.7 accuracy on seven graded calls.
*One grading note, in the interest of not overselling our own file:* three of the nine graded misses look like parsing problems rather than bad punditry. Mark Kaboly's flat statement that Mason Rudolph *"isn't getting released, cut, traded, or put on the practice squad. Full stop"* is recorded as a claim that Rudolph would not make the 53, and graded 0. DeArdo's *"keeping all four"* line on Will Howard is recorded the same inverted way. A Chris Brockman take about Aaron Rodgers returning is attached to Isaiah Rodgers. Read those three rows with suspicion.
The rest of the graded record
Two clusters stand out. Every one of the 29 graded playoff picks on Pittsburgh was correct — 100 accuracy, +13.8 skill — which is what happens when a team makes the field three years running and the field keeps picking it. Every one of the nine graded award picks involving a Steeler was wrong: 0 accuracy.
Win totals are the tidiest miss. Eleven pundits put a number on Pittsburgh's 2025 season; the actual was 10. Colin Cowherd had 9 and 8, Danny Parkins 9, Aaron Schatz 7.7, Brockman 6, with Kyle Brandt, Brady Quinn, Rich Eisen and Richard Sherman all landing on 10. The field averaged 8.9 — a collective undershoot of roughly a win, small enough that Pittsburgh never appeared among the league's worst consensus misses. Our graded win-total sample for the club is 13 calls at 81.1 accuracy but a −6.3 skill score: close numbers that a naive guess would also have produced.
Mock drafts (47 graded, 57.3 accuracy, +33.9 skill) and game outcomes (39 graded, 57.3, +7.7) fill out the middle. Depth-chart calls are the largest raw category at 106 takes but only 10 are graded, so there is no verdict there yet.
Fifteen pundits clear five graded Steelers takes. The best-graded of them, on samples too thin to rank confidently: Rich Eisen at 89.2 across 10, Strackbein at 85.7 across 7, DeArdo at 80.0 across 5, Dulac at 75.0 across 8. Markowski and Brandt sit at 100 on 8 apiece. At the other end, Nick Wright carries the largest Steelers sample of anyone — 14 graded — at 41.7 accuracy and −44.1 skill, and Derek Brown is at 25.8 on five.
By outlet, Sports Illustrated has the best graded Steelers line at 94.7 accuracy on 19 calls (+63.2 skill), with Move the Sticks at 84.2 on 20. The 33rd Team sits at 32.2 on 23.
The short version: our sources undercovered a playoff team, graded out fine on the big structural stuff, and misjudged the bottom of the roster — three players they wrote off in August were on the 53 in September. </bodyMd> <parameter name="tags">["coverage report", "2026 season", "steelers", "roster cuts"]