I've been a Steelers fan my whole life, which means I've watched a lot of seasons that started with hope and ended with hard questions about the roster. Rebuilding a football team and rebuilding a marketing function look nothing alike on the surface. They rhyme more than you'd expect once you're in the middle of either one.
You can't fix everything in one offseason
Every rebuild I've been part of, whether it's a marketing team I inherited or a franchise trying to reload, starts with the same temptation: fix everything at once. New systems, new hires, new strategy, new brand, all in the first ninety days. It never works, in football or in marketing. You end up with a team that has whiplash instead of a team that has momentum.
The rebuilds that actually work pick two or three priorities and get disciplined about sequencing everything else. When I walk into a new marketing organization, I don't touch the brand, the tech stack, and the team structure simultaneously. I figure out which one is actually blocking growth, fix that first, and let the wins there fund the next phase.
Trust the depth chart, but don't be sentimental about it
A good rebuild keeps the players who are actually performing and moves on from the ones who aren't, regardless of reputation or tenure. Marketing teams have the same dynamic. I've inherited teams with people who were excellent at the old strategy and struggling with the new one, and the hardest, most necessary conversations were about whether that gap could close or whether it was time for a different role fit.
The scoreboard doesn't lie, but it also doesn't tell the whole story
A rough season doesn't mean every decision that led to it was wrong. Injuries happen. Market conditions shift. The same is true in marketing: a bad quarter doesn't automatically mean the strategy was flawed. Part of leading a turnaround is being honest about which misses were execution problems and which were bad luck, and not overcorrecting on the wrong one.
Culture is the actual rebuild
The best organizational turnarounds, on a field or in a marketing department, aren't really about scheme or tactics. They're about rebuilding a culture where people trust the plan, trust each other, and are willing to grind through the unglamorous stretch before the results show up. I've never led a marketing turnaround that succeeded on strategy alone. It succeeded because the team believed the plan would work before the numbers proved it.
That's the part I think about most as a Pittsburgh fan and a marketing leader: talent matters, systems matter, but belief carries a team through the part of the rebuild where the scoreboard hasn't caught up yet.