There is a specific kind of misery available only to a fan whose team just won. Not the loss-hangover, not the blown-lead nausea — something stranger. Your team wins, the record says 1-0, and you spend the rest of the night arguing that the win doesn’t count the way everybody else says it counts. You paid the tax. Welcome to being a Steelers fan in September of the 2025 season.
Because here’s the deal. Pittsburgh went out in Week One and got the job done against the Jets, and Chris Boswell walked out there and drilled a 60-yard field goal to seal it. Sixty. That is not a kick, that’s a weather event. And under normal circumstances, every yinzer on earth would be in the streets with a Terrible Towel and a plate of something fried. Instead, a huge chunk of that fan base is walking around like they just got handed a gift from somebody they don’t like at a party they didn’t want to attend.
The Credit Problem
The quarterback is Aaron Rodgers. That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire mechanism.
Some fans got a decade-plus of loathing that man built up in their bones — the darkness retreats, the Bears-owner stuff, the drawn-out will-he-won’t-he retirement theater, the jets-and-jokes era in New York. That’s not a rational position and nobody’s pretending it is. It’s a fan position, which is a different and more honest category of thinking. You don’t like who you don’t like. And now he’s wearing your colors, taking your snaps, and the first result on the board is a W.
So what do you do? You do what fans always do when the math and the heart disagree: you find another author for the win. Boswell got the victory. The defense got the victory. The Jets lost it more than Pittsburgh won it. Every now and then, as the saying goes around here, even a guy with no business getting lucky gets lucky.
And you know what? Half of that is even defensible. It was the Jets. It did take a 60-yard field goal, which is a sentence that carries an enormous amount of freight — a 60-yarder to win it means the offense stalled somewhere it shouldn’t have, means somebody left points on the field earlier, means the game was closer than a healthy team would let it get. If you’re building an indictment, the raw materials are right there.
But let’s be adults about what’s actually happening. This isn’t analysis. This is an emotional refund policy.
What The Tax Actually Costs You
I want to make a case that this posture is more expensive than fans realize, and it has nothing to do with fairness to Aaron Rodgers. He’s fine. He has been fine for twenty years. He does not need your affirmation and he’d probably find it suspicious if he got it.
The cost is to you. Here’s how.
When you decide in advance that a win doesn’t count, you’ve quietly signed a contract that says the next fifteen or sixteen of them won’t count either. Because the same logic that discounts a Week One win over the Jets discounts a Week Eight win over somebody mediocre, and by the time Pittsburgh is playing a game that genuinely matters, you’ve spent two months training yourself not to feel anything. That’s not skepticism. That’s pre-emptive self-defense, and the price of it is that you don’t get to enjoy the season you’re actually watching.
I’ve seen fans in the 2025 offseason do the same thing in reverse — decide a guy is a savior in July, then get furious in October when the guy turns out to be a football player and not a religious figure. Both errors come from the same place. You’re not watching the team. You’re watching your own prediction and grading it.
The tell is when a fan starts picking against his own team. Not as a hedge — as a statement. Taking Seattle over Pittsburgh in Week Two isn’t a football read at that point, it’s a public notarization: see, I told you I don’t believe. It’s a way of getting out ahead of disappointment by pre-ordering it. And listen, if the reasoning is real — road environment, defensive front, whatever — say the reasoning. But if the reasoning is I’d rather be right than happy, that’s a different sport you’re playing, and nobody hands out trophies in it.
The Other Side Of The Same Coin
And before anybody in another fan base gets comfortable: the reverse version of this disease is just as ugly, and September is when it blooms.
You know the type. The ones who vanished for an entire disaster of a season — didn’t answer the phone, didn’t post, didn’t want their name attached to the thing — and then the first sign of daylight comes and suddenly they’re the loudest voice in every thread. Full uniform. Full history lesson. Acting like they were in the building the whole time.
Same disease, different symptom. Both are people trying to protect their record instead of supporting a team. The ghost wants to be right by disappearing. The Rodgers-hater wants to be right by refusing credit. Neither one is actually watching the games — they’re both managing a personal brand where the product is being correct.
Real fandom is being wrong in public and staying anyway. That’s the whole job.
The Only Clean Way Out
Here’s the move, and it’s simpler than the alternative everybody’s currently attempting: separate the man from the season.
You are allowed to not like Aaron Rodgers. Genuinely, permanently, for reasons you can’t fully articulate. Never did, never will — that’s fine, that’s a valid lifelong position, and nobody should try to argue you out of it, least of all in September.
What you’re not allowed to do is let that dislike run your entire viewing experience for four months. Take the win. Say the words: we won. Not he won, not Boswell won — we. The uniform is the unit. If the guy plays badly in Week Two, you get to say so, loudly, with receipts, and you’ll have earned the right because you were honest the week before. That’s how credibility works in a group chat, in a barbershop, in a comment section.
The fans who spend all of the 2025 season refusing to credit anything are going to arrive at January — assuming Pittsburgh gets there — having felt nothing all year. And then, if it ends the way most seasons end for most teams, they’ll say they knew it. Congratulations. You knew it. You also missed it.
Boswell hit a 60-yard field goal to win a football game. That is an absurd, glorious, borderline-illegal thing to watch happen. If your relationship with your own team is so complicated that you couldn’t fully enjoy that, the problem isn’t the quarterback.
Take the win. Argue about the reasons in December. The standings don’t have a column for credit.
Where This Came From
This take grew out of this week’s U TALK LIVE NFL Edition, where the great Rodgers-credit standoff played out live on air between two hosts who were both 1-0 and only one of whom would admit to being happy about it. Go listen to how that argument actually sounded — it’s funnier and meaner than anything I could summarize here.
This take grew out of the September 13, 2025 episode — watch it here: “We got our win did you?” U TALK LIVE NFL Edition-4