When the Seattle Seahawks and Pittsburgh Steelers take to the turf at Lumen Field on Sunday afternoon for their Week 17 showdown, it won’t be the highest stakes matchup between the two teams. That, of course, goes to Super Bowl XL in which the Steelers defeated the Hawks 21-10, handing Mike Holmgren the second Super Bowl loss of his career. Unlike the Super Bowl, in which the Seahawks were 4-point underdogs, Seattle enters this one as 4-point favorites, per DraftKings Sportsbook.
Seahawks fans will, no doubt, be quick to blame the refs and excuse the performance of the team, but it wasn’t the refs that allowed the longest rushing play in Super Bowl history.
And it wasn’t the refs who allowed Ben Roethlisberger to convert on 3rd & 28 leading to the Steelers first score. Sure, there were bad calls in the game, but the Hawks also made enough mistakes and played poorly enough that they did not deserve to win.
Now, whether that will be the case on Sunday is a completely different story. The Seahawks enter on a two game winning streak after having dropped four in a row in November and December. As for the Steelers, they enter the game coming off their highest scoring offensive performance of the season, having put 34 points on the board against their division rival Cincinnati Bengals. Multiple factors aligned to allow Pittsburgh to score that much, including moving on from offensive coordinator Matt Canada in late November and Mason Rudolph playing well in place of an injured Kenny Pickett.
So, following the performance of Rudolph in Week 16, he will once again get the nod in Week 17 when the Steelers take on the Seahawks, and is the third different starting quarterback for Pittsburgh this season after Pickett and Mitch Trubisky. Interestingly, the Steelers announced that Rudolph would start even though 2022 first-round pick Kenny Pickett was health enough to start, while Trubisky is Trubisky and there’s not a whole lot to be said outside of asking why Pittsburgh felt the need to burn so much cap space on his services.
On the Seattle side, things are back to usual with Geno Smith set to start a second consecutive game after returning from a groin injury that sidelined him for two weeks and gave Drew Lock fans what they have been screaming about since he was acquired in trade from the Denver Broncos. Smith, of course, is signed for two more seasons through 2025, while Lock is signed for just two more regular season games and is set to hit free agency for the second offseason in a row. There will certainly be no shortage of ink spilled on this subject in the coming weeks, especially with a crucial decision date looming for Smith’s contract, with his entire 2024 base salary of $12.7M vesting into being fully guaranteed if he remains on the roster the Friday after the Super Bowl.
Boiling all that down, it will be Geno Smith versus Mason Rudolph. It’s the third time in his career that Smith has started against the Steelers, losing 23-20 in 2021 while Russell Wilson was out with a broken finger and dropping an ugly 19-6 game as the starter for the New York Jets in Week 6 of his rookie season. It will be the first time in Rudolph’s career that he will start against Seattle, though he did see significant playing time in the 2019 matchup when Ben Roethlisberger left the game early with an elbow issue that ended his season in Week 2. That game, fans might remember, involved one of the last - if not the last - pass interference calls following a challenge and replay, something to keep in mind as fans and observers lament the state of officiating in the current NFL.
In any case, it’s Seahawks-Steelers in a matchup of fanbases that strongly dislike one another, and fanbases locked in a quarterback controversy, even if only one of the teams has an actual quarterback controversy because the other team has Geno Smith, who is very good.
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December 31, 2023 at 04:30AM
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Week 17 preview: Seahawks-Steelers is a game filled with quarterback questions - Field Gulls
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