For the Steelers, the West Coast hasn’t been the best coast

The Pittsburgh Steelers are heading to the West Coast for Week 11 to face the Los Angeles Chargers on Sunday Night Football. It will be the Steelers first trip to the Pacific Time Zone since Week 6 of the 2019 season when they took on the Chargers for the first time in L.A. and not San Diego. Although the Steelers left Los Angeles with a victory in the first career start by Devlin “Duck” Hodges, it was the exception more than the rule when it comes to the Steelers traveling to the West Coast.

Going back to the year 2000, the Pittsburgh Steelers have played 14 games in the Pacific Time Zone. Those games are against teams such as the Chargers, whether in Los Angeles or San Diego, the San Francisco 49ers, the Oakland Raiders, and the Seattle Seahawks. In those games from this millennium, the Steelers have a record of 4–10.

The Steelers 28.6% winning percentage is pretty low, and, in fact, it’s their worst time zone by far to play over the last 20 seasons with the exception of being 0–1 in London. When the Steelers are on the road, the closer they get to the East Coast the better their winning percentage. When the Steelers play in the Mountain Time Zone, they have a 36.4% winning percentage. Once the Steelers get to the Central Time Zone, their winning percentage takes a bigger jump at 51.5%. When the Steelers are playing away from Heinz Field but in the Eastern Time Zone, they have a winning percentage of 65.7%. So as you can clearly see, the Steelers struggle the most on the West Coast of United States.

Although the struggle is real, it should be pointed out that the Steelers do have some success, which is actually all of their success, against one particular team. Although the Steelers only have four wins in the Pacific Time Zone since 2000, all four have come against the Los Angeles/San Diego Chargers. In fact, the Steelers have a 4–1 record when facing the Chargers on the road.

So even though the Pittsburgh Steelers struggle on the West Coast, at least their opponent in 2021 is the one team in which they found success. While this is interesting, it really doesn’t mean that much to this Steelers team in 2021. Although the traveling and the time difference can be an adjustment, the fact that the Steelers play on Sunday Night Football will hopefully not give them a reason to try to adjust their internal clocks. Instead, hopefully the Pittsburgh Steelers can go out in front of a huge wave of Black and Gold as Steelers’ Nation takes over SoFi stadium and the Steelers can improve their winning percentage in the Pacific Time Zone.

This topic and more was discussed in the most recent episode of BTSC’s Steelers Stat Geek podcast which can be heard below: