Pittsburgh has made the playoffs in four of the past five years yet has zero postseason wins to show for it.
In an effort to rectify those failures, the Steelers have plunged head first into the offseason, trading for wide receiver DK Metcalf and adding defensive contributors such as Malik Harrison, Darius Slay and Juan Thornhill.
Defensive lineman Cameron Heyward has long been part of a Steelers team known for building conservatively. Now, heading into Year 15, he's taken notice of the team's emphatic push for more serious contention.
“I think we’re in a state of urgency," Heyward said Friday on The Rich Eisen Show. "We have a lot of guys that, like myself, are in the latter stages of their career. We all want to win. It’s not just enough to win a playoff game, which we haven’t won in a couple years, and there’s a bad taste in our mouth because of that.”
Asked to elaborate on Pittsburgh's urgency, Heyward pointed to several of his acclaimed teammates.
“Urgency to do it before we have multiple guys that hang it up," Heyward said. "You have a guy like T.J. Watt. You don’t just get a T.J. Watt and you sit on that T.J. Watt, you make sure you maximize those opportunities to win at a high level. And with Minkah Fitzpatrick -- All-Pro guys that are soon to be Hall of Famers that we have so much respect for. We’ve got to win now. It’s not enough to look toward the future and say, 'Oh, two or three years out we could be very good.’ Two or three years out we could be a totally different team, so we’ve got to make the most of this right now.”
Heyward humbly left himself off the list of guys the franchise must win for. At 35, he's coming off his fourth All-Pro campaign and seventh as a Pro Bowler, having added another eight sacks to his 88.5 career total.
His comments on urgency also can't go without a look at Pittsburgh's quarterback room.
The Steelers currently roster only Skylar Thompson and Mason Rudolph and hold the No. 21 overall pick in the 2025 NFL Draft. There's not a surefire way to land a top QB prospect, nor would a rookie from the incoming class necessarily put the Black and Gold over the top in the immediate future.
A hypothetically quicker way to get over the playoff hump would be to add a signal-caller like Aaron Rodgers, also on a rushed timeline to win entering his 21st season. Rodgers visited the Steelers on Friday, although there is no deal imminent.
Days before Rodgers' free-agent visit, Heyward made waves on his podcast while discussing the four-time Most Valuable Player, saying he wouldn't do a "darkness retreat" to recruit Rodgers and "either you want to be a Pittsburgh Steeler or you don't."
With Rodgers in the building Friday, Heyward clarified he was never taking a dig.
“It’s funny. Everybody gave me crap," Heyward told Eisen. "They said I called him out. I don’t think I really called him out. I just said I was not going to go on a darkness retreat to recruit him. That if he wants to be a Steeler, he can be a Steeler. That’s the pitch. I don’t know why everybody thought, ‘Oh, Cam’s really going at him.’ Some fans felt like, ‘Oh yeah, keep doing that,’ and the other fans felt like, ‘Oh, man, you’re really gonna scare him off.’ I’m not scaring anybody off. I just want to win games and play good football.”
Pittsburgh has done plenty of winning during Heyward's career. The Steelers have still yet to endure a losing season since coach Mike Tomlin took over in 2007 and have logged double-digit victories in two straight years. Their ceiling has recently remained the Wild Card Round, though, and last season their most apparent weakness was a 27th-ranked passing offense.
Metcalf's acquisition, putting another dangerous wide receiver alongside George Pickens, is part of the formula to finally fixing the team's passing-game woes.
Giving them someone equally potent under center to throw those two the ball must still come to fruition.
If it does end up being Rodgers, who won his lone Super Bowl by defeating Pittsburgh on the game's grandest stage a few months before Heyward's arrival in the 2011 draft, there's a bit of serendipity in that.
“There’s some poetic moves being played," Heyward said. "The last Super Bowl he won was against the Pittsburgh Steelers, and now we kind of need him to come over here and win a Super Bowl. But the thing I love is it’s not going to just be one guy. There’s a multitude of guys that if he does come here, they’re only locked in on that. If you walk into our locker room, every guy in that room is focused on trying to win a Super Bowl. We don’t go a day, we don’t go a minute, without talking about it. There’s a level of accountability he brings and expects from guys around him. As a defender, we love that. We’ll see what happens.”