Winning solves a lot of problems, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your work and have fun doing it even without the winning. That is more true of a sport like football than it would be of just about any other, where there are clear divisions like the offensive players and the defensive players.
Even on a ‘bad’ team, a defense can take pride in its own performance in controlling what is in its power to control while the offense is terrible. That is kind of where the Pittsburgh Steelers were in 2019, with a top-five defense supporting a bottom-five offense, and unsurprisingly that resulted in an 8-8 record.