Culture
Kaboly: Russell Wilson could set the Steelers back years, so they better win now
One thing you can’t accuse the Pittsburgh Steelers of anymore is being conservative. Or of not doing everything in their power to put themselves in a position to win championships.
That is quite clear after they courted and convinced Russell Wilson to join a team whose general manager, Omar Khan, said less than two weeks ago that he had “full faith” in incumbent quarterback Kenny Pickett and wanted to re-sign free-agent quarterback Mason Rudolph, who surprisingly led Pittsburgh on a late run to the playoffs in 2023.
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Bringing Wilson on board is not conservative, even if it is financially — the Broncos will pay just under $38 million of his $39 million guaranteed salary. The move shows the Steelers will do anything to win now, even if there is only an outside chance that the 35-year-old (who had a .386 win percentage over the past three seasons) will ever return to his championship ways.
It doesn’t matter. Win now and worry about later some other time. Wilson no doubt shows the Steelers are thinking win-now when it comes to quarterback play.
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He was 11-19 in two seasons with the Broncos after spending a decade with Seattle. He bounced back from a miserable 2022 season to throw for 3,070 yards, 26 touchdowns and only eight interceptions in 2023.
Wilson still lost his job after going 7-8 in coach Sean Payton’s first season. He led the Broncos to consecutive wins over Green Bay, Kansas City, Buffalo, Minnesota and Cleveland but lost three of his last four before being benched.
Year 13. Grateful. @Steelers pic.twitter.com/0U4Q2sRtXs
— Russell Wilson (@DangeRussWilson) March 11, 2024
But there are consequences to what sure looks like a low-risk, no-lose situation for Pittsburgh.
By signing Wilson, the Steelers are starting the process of finding a franchise quarterback all over again.
You don’t bring in a nine-time Pro Bowler, or better yet, a former Super Bowl champ with a cheap price tag to compete with a third-year quarterback who has thrown only 13 touchdowns in 24 career starts, as Pickett has.
The catch is that there’s no guarantee Wilson, who agreed to a one-year deal, will be on the Steelers in 2025. Maybe he’ll play so well that he can make more money in free agency, or maybe he’ll fail miserably like he did two years ago and the Steelers won’t want him back.
This screams of being a one-year experiment.
Even if Wilson does play well, he will turn 36 in November. How much confidence do you have in any quarterback not named Tom Brady, Peyton Manning or John Elway winning a Super Bowl at that age?
And do you think the Steelers are truly only a quarterback away from a championship?
Now, that doesn’t mean this is the wrong decision. Given how Pickett has played, his lack of development in his second season and the team’s obvious lack of faith in Rudolph, this is a no-brainer signing — a no-brainer with consequences.
It’s all about what you value.
Would you rather have a chance to be more competitive with a Hall of Fame-caliber quarterback on the back end of his career? Or give the 20th pick in the 2022 draft — a guy the Steelers spoke glowingly of for the better part of 18 months — one more year with a competent coordinator and a new position coach?
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If you say try to win now and the hell with the consequences, the answer is Wilson.
If you say you aren’t interested in a turntable of possible quarterbacks of the future, the answer is Pickett, or whomever they might bring in or draft next year. The best-case scenario is drafting a quarterback in 2025 and developing him, which would bring you to at least 2027 before you’d know if you have your quarterback of the future.
You can deal with 2027 or even later if Wilson leads the Steelers to a championship. But, seriously, what are the odds of that happening?
They have to be extreme.
Many things have to fall the Steelers’ way — beyond Wilson playing well — for them to win a Super Bowl this season. Just look at the AFC, with Josh Allen, Aaron Rodgers, Joe Burrow, Lamar Jackson, C.J. Stroud, Justin Herbert and, oh yeah, Patrick Mahomes to deal with.
Rudolph will likely sign elsewhere, and make no mistake about it, Pickett’s career as a Pittsburgh Steeler is all but over. The Steelers have to decide on Pickett’s fifth-year option next May. I suppose a colossal Wilson failure coupled with a late-season Pickett push could change the youngster’s trajectory, but that’s asking a lot.
Wilson’s signing was as much about his play as it was about his salary.
You don’t often get a $40 million quarterback for $1.21 million, so it is understandable why the Steelers played coy about Wilson until the news of his impending release became official, and he was permitted to negotiate with other teams before his release.
Call it what it is — a calculated gamble … a calculated gamble that alienated two quarterbacks in the process.
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Losing Pickett doesn’t appear to be a big deal right now, but it could be.
He wasn’t given much of a chance during his rookie season, taking nearly all third-team reps until right before the season. He was then thrown into the game 14 quarters into his career, with Matt Canada as his offensive coordinator and a directive from above to dumb down the offense. Pickett’s relative success in that environment was a shock.
Last season was a total disaster the day after the preseason ended, and you can’t help but think that Canada had a lot to do with that. If his offense wasn’t suited for a Hall of Famer like Ben Roethlisberger, then how could Pickett succeed?
Pickett couldn’t, and he didn’t. I get it, I do.
But that was all supposed to change this year with Arthur Smith running the offense and Tom Arth bringing the knowledge he passed onto Herbert with the Chargers.
Now, that won’t happen. When you think of Pickett, there will always be a, “What if?”
What if the Steelers didn’t retain Canada after the 2022 season? What if Pickett got a third year to develop? Those questions will never be answered now.
All Wilson’s signing will do is ensure a revolving door at quarterback, with no end in sight.
The only thing that will make this worthwhile is winning a Super Bowl, because when the Steelers decided to sign Wilson, they ensured they won’t have a stable quarterback position for years to come.
If you are OK with those consequences then, Let’s Ride … or should I say #HereWeGo?
(Photo: Harry How / Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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