What would it take for the Pittsburgh Steelers to fire a head coach? It hasn’t happened in decades. Their current head coach is going into his 15th season. His predecessor coaches for 15 seasons before retiring, that being Bill Cowher. Chuck Noll preceded him, helming the team for 23 seasons before he, too, retired. Both of them are now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
While I’m sure there were moments during their respective tenures when there was a vocal minority of fans who wanted to see them fired, advancements in technology such as social media have made it a lot easier for people to share their views, and there is certainly no shortage of content involving the insistence that the Steelers must fire Tomlin.
While he led the team to a 12-4 season, winning the AFC North, they lost in the wildcard round to the Cleveland Browns, and have now gone four consecutive seasons without recording a single postseason victory. They have total of three postseason wins since they last played in the Super Bowl at the end of the 2010 season.
According to Sportsbettingdime.com (via Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), the betting site has head coach Mike Tomlin as the head coach ninth-most likely to be either fired or resign over the course of the 2021 season.
Given that he is under contract through 2021 with a 2022 mutual option, and that team president Art Rooney II already made it clear that they view him their coach for the future, it seems pretty unlikely that he is going to get fired any time soon, especially not within the next year, but you never know.
Many believe that Tomlin is closer to calling it a career than he is to being fired, and while that’s almost surely true, what they mean is that he could choose to hang it up within the next few seasons and want to simply life his life.
He is still relatively young, due to turn 49 years old next month, and his children are growing up, at or near college age. He is a family man, to be sure, and even for as much as fans criticize him, there isn’t a ton in the grand scheme of things that he hasn’t accomplished in this game. He has a title, after all, which is hard enough to achieve.
Will Tomlin win another Super Bowl before he retires? Probably not. But that’s true for the majority of people who ever coach at this level, including some great ones. Just look at how long it took Cowher to win, and Andy Reid…and Bruce Arians.
