Mike Tomlin is now the longest-tenured head coach after the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick parted ways following the 2023 season, but CBS Sports’ Cody Benjamin thinks there’s some similarity between Tomlin right now and Belichick at the end of his career. Both are great coaches, but Belichick struggled to have success toward the end of his career. Benjamin believes the same thing is happening with Tomlin given that Pittsburgh hasn’t won a playoff game since 2016.
While he ranked Tomlin in Tier A and the sixth-best head coach in football, he wrote that Tomlin’s ability to manage a locker room might be “masking” the lack of playoff success.
“There’s a little bit of a late-stage Bill Belichick conundrum happening here: Tomlin is an all-timer, forever averse to losing seasons and always getting late-year fight from even battered rosters. How much, however, are his locker-room gravitas and career resume masking the fact he hasn’t led a playoff win in literally eight years? At the very least, you always know his Steelers will be a tough out,” Benjamin wrote.
There’s no doubt that the Steelers fight and claw their way until the end of season, and recently, that’s led to them sneaking into the playoffs and getting waxed in the first round. Tomlin is a coach players want to play for and he does a great job controlling the message and controlling the locker room. But the lack of playoff success has been grating for fans and the organization, with owner Art Rooney II admitting the team has been getting “impatient” with the lack of success.
Something has to change soon, although not all the blame should fall on Tomlin. Late-career Ben Roethlisberger was solid and knew how to win, but he just wasn’t the same quarterback, and it was tough to win in the playoffs with him under center. Kenny Pickett wasn’t the type of quarterback the Steelers could win playoff games with, and now they’re in the position of finding out whether Russell Wilson or Justin Fields (likely Wilson) can be that guy.
The roster construction and quarterback play are a big reason why the Steelers haven’t won in the playoffs, and Tomlin can’t be blameless, either. But ranking him among the top coaches in the NFL is fair, and his placement at No. 6 is deserved given his track record of success and the fact that the Steelers are always competitive, no matter what the makeup of their roster is.
If the Steelers continue to struggle and can’t win in the playoffs, then there’s a chance that Tomlin’s most recent extension could be his last in Pittsburgh. This year is going to be paramount to Pittsburgh’s trying to break that drought with one of the best rosters the team has had in years.
