The Steelers went four decades without a playoff win, then built a dynasty
For almost forty years, Pittsburgh's football team was the NFL's great also-ran, the oldest franchise never to win a league title. It took one playoff game in its first four decades and lost that 21–0. Then a new coach arrived, drafted brilliantly, and the Steelers won four Super Bowls in six seasons.
Art Rooney, a local all-round athlete, paid 2,500 dollars for an NFL franchise in 1933. His team took the name of the city's baseball club, the Pirates, so newspapers nicknamed it the Rooneymen, and it lost its first game 23–2 to the Giants. The name Steelers came in 1940. The Rooney family has owned the club ever since, passing it from Art to his son Dan and then to grandson Art II.
Wartime player shortages forced odd marriages. In 1943 Pittsburgh joined forces with Philadelphia as the Steagles, and in 1944 with the Chicago Cardinals as Card-Pitt, mocked as the Carpets after going 0–10, the only winless season in club history. A move to the new American Football Conference in 1970 came with a 3 million dollar relocation fee, a windfall for a club that had rarely had money to build a contender.
The turnaround belonged to Chuck Noll, hired in 1969. His drafts were extraordinary: Joe Greene first, then Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris and others, and in 1974 four future Hall of Famers in one draft, John Stallworth, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert and Lynn Swann, something no team has matched. The 1972 Immaculate Reception, a deflected pass Harris snatched and ran in against Oakland, gave the club its first postseason win. The Steel Curtain defence then helped deliver titles in Super Bowls IX, X, XIII and XIV.
Continuity became the club's signature. Since 1969 it has had only a handful of head coaches: Noll, then Pittsburgh-area native Bill Cowher, who reached the playoffs in each of his first six seasons and won Super Bowl XL, then Mike Tomlin, the franchise's first African-American head coach. Pittsburgh now shares the record of six Super Bowl wins with New England, and its huge following calls itself Steeler Nation.
Source: Pittsburgh Steelers
