With the Steelers’ 2023 offseason underway following a disappointing season that came up just short of reaching the playoffs, it’s time to begin reloading, through the free agency process, through the draft, and perhaps even through trade.
This is now a young team on the offensive side of the ball, though one getting older on defense, and both sides could stand to be supplemented robustly, including in the trenches—either one. Changes have been made to the coaching staff, even if not all of the desired ones, as the roster continues to renew with the weeks ticking by.
These sorts of uncertainties are what I will look to address in our Buy or Sell series. In each installment, I will introduce a topic statement and weigh some of the arguments for either buying it (meaning that you agree with it or expect it to be true) or selling it (meaning you disagree with it or expect it to be false).
Topic Statement: Mike Tomlin is a top-five head coach right now.
Explanation: One of the diet staples of offseason content creation is best-of lists. Every outlet gets to publish their own, as many as they want, and then all the other outlets discuss them. When it comes to the Steelers, the case of Mike Tomlin and where he fits in the current head coach hierarchy is an interesting one, however, given where his team is within his career arc and with his no-losing-seasons streak bumping up against his no-winning-playoffs streak. This topic is about Tomlin only as a head coach, not a personnel guy.
Buy:
As incredulous as this may sound, you can’t simply judge a head coach by his team’s wins and losses. Sometimes you’re only as good as your roster, and the Steelers haven’t had the most talented rosters for much of the past decade. That’s largely the fault of Tomlin the talent evaluator, but we’re talking about Tomlin the head coach.
The reality is that Tomlin still gets about as much out of his team up to their capabilities as does anybody else in the league. Certainly nobody does a better job of getting his players to buy into his way of doing things. If somebody could just curate his teams better, we wouldn’t be having this discussion—and we’d also have maybe another Super Bowl title by now. With the roster he has moving forward, it shouldn’t be long before he gets back in the postseason win column and regains a more universal level of appreciation for his talents.
Sell:
Because of the limitations I’ve set here, I’m not going to knock Tomlin’s rosters and the immense role he plays in putting them together. But ultimately, there are of course at least five head coaches who are better than he is right now.
Start at the top with Andy Reid, of course, and even if he’s lost some of his sheen since the Tom Brady divorce (from the Patriots, not Giselle), almost nobody would argue against Bill Belichick’s greatness. As much as it might sting, John Harbaugh has accomplished as much as Tomlin or more in roughly the same duration. Pete Carroll just made Geno Smith relevant again.
Kyle Shanahan is blessed to come from his own father’s coaching tree, but he’s also his own personality. The guy almost took a rookie seventh-round quarterback to the Super Bowl—and may have if he didn’t get injured. Then there’s Sean McDermott up in Buffalo and Sean McVay with the Rams, who basically didn’t have a healthy quarterback of competence all last year. He may no longer be able to claim no losing seasons, but at least he wins in the playoffs.
And, look, we don’t even need to stop there. The reality is there are a lot of good coaches out there right now. Tomlin is one of them, but he’s just not in the top five. He talks about flexibility, yet his teams rarely seem to reflect that. He’s a better theorist than practitioner.
