Steelers have a better GM and head coach. In this league, with the salary cap, your roster can only out talent other teams for only so long because other teams will be plucking your talented players off of the roster sooner or later. Obviously, that means you have to draft well, but a LOT is contingent on coaching that can develop players and get them to buy in to a solid program. People keep saying Tomlin isn't that great, which is beyond me, when the guy has already won one super bowl, has been to another, and has his team looking like one of the best teams in the league. Steelers are still looking tough years after Cowher and Lebeau, so we can't simply say he's winning with the previous coach's players.
On the other hand, we have significant weaknesses in both our FO and our HC, which is why you never see any kind of stability with this organization. We have an excellent draft specialist in Will McClay, and you saw how those rookies transformed the organization last year, but the very next year, the genius FO took a team that was primed for a superbowl run for the next few years, blew it up and put it in rebuild mode by letting all of our starting secondary walk. Now, we have to wait for these guys we drafted to develop and hope they pan out. It doesn't help that just about all of our free agent signings are no longer on the team. Great time to go cheap and 'save money' when you have Dak and Zeke on rookie contracts and you still have Zack Martin and Demarcus Lawrence on the cheap as well. Shouldn't we have signed some vets on one or two year deals who are actually quality? Sad enough to say, our FO thinks we literally have to build ONLY through the draft unless we're scraping the bottom of the barrel from other teams. Occasionally we will come up with an Irving off of their practice squad, but look at the rest of our pickups. Where are they at? The problem is we have people who are unqualified for their roles in the two most important spots for continued success in this modern league. If you want sustained success, you need a great HC and you need a great FO. The Jones have no business trying to be GMs. They need to stick with being owners and getting out of the way. Garrett has no business being a head coach in the NFL. Will we even have 4 playoff wins in a decade? How many years will we need to rebuild? As soon as we've 'rebuilt' one section of the team, another one is gone in free agency, so there are your perpetual excuses for that 'one necessary piece we need to draft' for success.
I will go on record and say FO is THE most important aspect of success in modern football. As important as QBs are to teams, they can only do so much if the GM isn't doing their job. Romo was enough to win a superbowl, as is Dak... but Romo had several 8 and 8 seasons and Dak looks like he's well on his way to his first of possibly many 8 and 8s to no fault of his own. Why? Because the FO.
The FO hires the HC and they play a monumental part in the players we bring in. Look at the eagles. Chip Kelly destroyed that team and they looked like bottom dwellers for the next five years, but somehow they got a 1st rounder for Sam Bradford, who has shown, stop after stop, to be a mediocre QB, and parlayed that pick into getting their franchise QB and they are currently the face of the league this year. They rebuilt that whole team in what, 2 years? On the other hand, we couldn't even get a single pick for Romo when teams such as the Broncos and Texans were hungry for QBs and we blew up a potential SB team and now we look like we're headed for 8 and 8 land. The FO did the same thing to Romo when they blew up our Oline. He had to play for years under a terrible O-line, and by the time they actually rebuilt it, his body was broken down and he was on his way into the broadcast booth. Romo was enough to win a superbowl as is Dak. They have blown up Dak's defense, and if Sean Lee goes down, this literally looks like one of the worst defenses in the league.
Our GM/owner treats the cowboys like a family run business instead of a performance based organization and he won't remove his adopted son garrett from a position which he clearly isn't qualified for. Romo saying Garrett isn't a scheme guy should tell you all you need to know. You can't out talent the league for long. You have to have coaches that can get the most out of their players, which we aren't. I frankly do not understand why over a period of 20 years, the Jones' can't figure it out and get over their ego, hire the best GM they can find or possibly just give McClay full reins, since he is doing a fantastic job with the draft and move out of the way. Sad enough to say, the league might actually be doing us a favor in terms of wins if they forced Jones to sell the team.
