It’s well-known that Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin hasn’t had the playoff success in the last decade or so that is expected within the franchise. Just three playoff wins in the last decade. That’s not good enough.
Neither is the seemingly usual .500 or slightly above record over the years. It’s understandable that some in the fan base use those stats as knocks on the future Hall of Fame head coach.
What can’t be used as a knock on Tomlin is the consistency he displays each and every season, putting together 16-straight non-losing seasons — a seemingly impossible task in today’s NFL landscape with free agency and more player movement than ever before.
That consistency and the ability to get the most out of his team, even when expectations are low, is why ESPN’s Mina Kimes and The Ringer’s Kevin Clark still hold the longtime Steelers head coach in such high regard. Both ranked him as their No. 3 head coach in the NFL on Wednesday on the latest episode of The Mina Kimes Show.
“I mean, 16-straight winning seasons is absolutely insane, especially considering how hard it is to win that consistently in the modern NFL, but also the end of those seasons with a shell of Ben Roethlisberger, last year onboarding a new quarterback without…I feel like somehow we’re not even acknowledging enough the fact that they were missing their best player on their entire team for like half the season in T.J. Watt,” Kimes said while making the case for Tomlin as the third-best coach in the NFL. “The other thing, I think, that’s really telling when it comes to Tomlin’s greatness is after the bye, the offense was excellent. This is kind of a thing you notice with a lot of really good coaches in the NFL is like after the bye, if the team really improves in some regard.
“They beat up on some bad teams, but they played the Bengals pretty close, Baltimore close. They finished 14th in DVOA with, I think, a pretty middling roster in a lot of regards, especially when you consider the injuries and the new quarterback. So to me, you gotta look to the head coach, to try to explain so much success, not just over such a long period of time, but literally the most recent year.”
The 2022 season was largely a transition season for the Steelers. Even after a disastrous start to the post-Ben Roethlisberger era that saw the Steelers fall to 2-6 entering the Week 9 bye week, Tomlin and the Steelers rebounded after the bye, going 7-2 down the stretch to finish 9-8, narrowly missing the playoffs.
During that 2-6 start, the Steelers were not only breaking in a new quarterback in Mitch Trubisky, but they were also without star T.J. Watt, who got hurt late in the Week 1 overtime win over the Cincinnati Bengals, missing the next seven games before returning after the bye against the New Orleans Saints.
Then, at halftime of Week 4, Tomlin made the switch to rookie quarterback Kenny Pickett, leading to another transition under center.
Eventually though, the Steelers got healthy, Pickett settled in and the offense leaned heavily on the run game in the second half of the season, becoming that physical, grind-it-out team that Tomlin envisioned and likely has always wanted as a defensive-minded head coach.
While he still has some issues with in-game decision making, clock management and helping his team get off to fast starts to open the season, it’s hard to deny Tomlin being a top 3-5 coach in the NFL.
That sentiment remains true in the national media landscape, as well as from outside fan bases. For some reason though, within the local media and Steelers fan base, there’s a lot of criticism and unhappiness with Tomlin. That might never change. For now though, and likely through the end of his career, Tomlin will remain in that upper echelon of head coaches in the NFL before eventually finding his forever home in the hallowed halls of Canton in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
