Any lapse in performance will naturally invite the possibility of discord. A team with a winning record in December losing to two teams with a .167 winning percentage will do that for you, as the Pittsburgh Steelers found out last week.
And the same topics that always come up with the Steelers have an ugly loss or an uninspiring performance came up once again in the wake of last week’s losses to the Arizona Cardinals and the New England Patriots. Every loss becomes a referendum—not that there isn’t an argument to be made that a referendum is needed.
Principally, has the coaching tenure of Mike Tomlin run its course? After 17 years on the job, is it time to move on? It appears as though he is headed toward his seventh consecutive season without recording a single victory in the playoffs. He’s only 8-9 overall in the postseason, with only four years in which he recorded at least one win.
Has his message “grown stale”, as we often hear? Are his diatribes falling on deaf ears? Has he lost the ability to appropriately motivate his players? Well, that never seems to be the message coming from the players themselves, and he continues to be recognized as the coach players most want to play for.
Perhaps there’s a more practical factor involved. “It’s tough to motivate anyone when you don’t have Ben Roethlisberger as your QB”, Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pointed out on Thursday. That remark came in a recent chat session in which he was responding to a reader asking what Tomlin could do to motivate the team and himself.
Perhaps unrealized by popular history, there was many a kamikaze mission that went unfulfilled at the end of World War II. The point is, that sometimes no amount of motivation in the world can get certain people inspired to strive for seemingly unattainable goals.
The kamikaze missions were chiefly carried out at the end of the war when virtually all hope was lost in a desperate act. And in the NFL, sometimes not having a franchise quarterback can feel just as pointless. The further removed we get from that “perfect” preseason, the less convincing it is that Kenny Pickett is the answer at quarterback the Steelers hoped he would be.
Of course, there’s always next year, and that’s the current hope we have to cling to. They fired Matt Canada, after all, which means a new offensive coordinator in 2024. Will he have a career turnaround like Tua Tagovailoa, or will he be just another middling quarterback who cycles through coaches?
After all, Roethlisberger is the principle reason for Tomlin’s employment longevity. He had a franchise quarterback at his disposal for the better part of 15 years. Even at the end of his career, when his talent faded, he still knew how to win games.
And he had the resume, the history. The proof. At this point, Pickett is just the boy next door, most intriguing for his neighbors. He’s not convincing many others yet of his charm. He’s no prom king. Not this year, anyway.
So if the players lack some motivation, it could be beyond the reach of the coaching staff. No doubt, many teams struggling at the quarterback position have a locker room with a hopeless feeling. You’re wasting a part of your short career when you’re playing with a quarterback who can’t win a championship.
