Jul 25, 2015 5 min read

Here we go.

The Steelers are in camp at Latrobe so you know what that means. Summer is over. Because of the Hall of Fame game, the Steelers are reporting a week earlier, but football is officially in the air, the first exhibition game is in two weeks and football talk will make you forget it’s summer.

Football will dominate the talk shows and, before you know it, you’ll be seeing the back-to-school ads on TV and you’ll be waking the kids up for school.

Mike Tomlin showed up on campus with a shiny new contract extension that will guarantee him a paycheck through the 2018 season. Whether it guarantees him a job for that long is a different story.

You might have noticed that the Rooney family doesn’t fire coaches that often, but you also might have noticed that the Steelers haven’t won a playoff game in four years.

The last time they went five years without a postseason win, the Steelers were the worst major professional team in the history of North American sports. That was pre-Chuck Noll, when they were nearing the end of a 40-year stretch with no postseason wins.

Tomlin deserves a lot of credit for last season.

There weren’t a lot of people predicting an 11-5 season and an AFC North Championship.

I was thinking somewhere between 7-9 and 9-7 and leaning toward 8-8.

So, based on the way the Rooney family rocks, an extension was expected and deserved, but what happens if the team struggles against what is, on paper, the toughest schedule in the NFL?

Questions will have to be asked about whether Tomlin can win with a team made up mostly of players who came after he did.

When he replaced Bill Cowher, Tomlin inherited a Hall of Fame quarterback, a Hall of Fame safety, a Pro Bowl running back, one of the best pass rushing teams in the league and a genius defensive coordinator.

His teams have not maintained the standard with the players he has drafted – and he has a say in the draft – and developed. As he likes to remind us, “The standard is the standard.”

• For the 2015 team to improve on last year, it will have to do a better job of scoring touchdowns with one of the best offenses in the league. It says here that Antonio Brown was not only the best wide receiver in the NFL last year, but the best player. Le’Veon Bell might have been the best all around running back and Ben Roethlisberger is one of the five best quarterbacks in the league.

That’s a pretty good start toward winning a lot of games in a pass happy, dink and dunk league. But is this team better than the one that lost a playoff game to the Ravens last January?

I don’t think so. Especially if it plays the first three games without Bell, who is suspended for that time.

The defense has a lot to prove and a lot of young, unproven talent to do the proving. And it will have to prove it against the Seahawks, Colts, Bengals, Broncos and Ravens during a five-week stretch beginning Nov. 29.

I’m thinking 8-8 again, but I could be wrong, again.

• Getting Aramis Ramirez from the Brewers for a pretty good prospect was a smart move by the Pirates but they still got a 37-year-old guy hitting .247 with 11 home runs. They better not stop there. You can count on the Cardinals making themselves better at the trade deadline. That’s just what they do.

• What’s Roger Goodell waiting for? It’s been six months since the AFC Championship and a month since Tom Brady was suspended for Deflategate. Brady and the NFLPA have threatened to sue. Brady also has reportedly offered to buy his way back in by paying a bigger fine. If Goodell caves on this, he should make the day he caves his last day as NFL commissioner. He will have achieved zero credibility.

• The first Steelers camp I covered at Saint Vincent was 1977. I was a 28-year-old reporter for KQV Radio. No big stories except for the Jack Lambert and Mel Blount holdouts and Blount suing Chuck Noll for $5 million.

• If you watch HBO Real Sports’ report on the “Everybody Gets a Trophy” trend, make sure you do it on an empty stomach.

• The Kansas City Royals increased their payroll by more than 300 percent this season to $113 million. Last year, it was $2 million more than the Pirates. This year, it’s $25 million more.

• If Gregory Polanco were living up to expectations, he’d have 15 to 20 home runs right now and be batting somewhere near .300 and the Pirates might be in first place. He is barely a .200 hitter since his first month last season.

• Five of the six divisions in Major League Baseball are led by the team with the highest payroll in the division. The Royals are the exception. They are basically tied for second highest in the AL Central with the Chicago White Sox.

• Four years ago the Royals’ payroll was $30 million.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter