Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin walked away from the podium near the end of his postgame press conference yesterday evening as a reporter was asking him about his contract status. I doubt very much that it means anything significant about his future with the team, but that’s just my opinion. You can keep reading if you’re interested in that. If not, you can move on.
To the best of my recollection, I don’t believe that Tomlin has ever fled a podium before when irritated by a question, at least in this fashion, in this context, before the question was even finished. In that sense, it was unprecedented.
Many opt to interpret this as the 17-year veteran head coach reaching his wit’s end, hitting the burnout, ready to do something different with his life, or at least the same thing in a different locale. Personally, I think he just resented the context and timing of the question while already being in a naturally horrible mood.
We all know that Tomlin has faced more pressure and scrutiny this year than ever before. It was just a few weeks ago that we were talking about his future and the possibility of his being fired or opting to retire during the team’s three-game losing streak. Clearly he didn’t have it anymore. And then his team responded with a three-game winning streak to finish with a respectable 10-7 record and make the playoffs.
They fought so hard to just get there, and even having done what they did, it wasn’t enough, because they still needed another team to lose. They got the help that they needed. They made the playoffs as the seventh seed. Then they had a weather delay on top of that.
Then his team went out there and stunk for nearly all of the first half, turning the ball over twice, fumbling multiple times, making mistakes that had nothing to do with Tomlin and which were antithetical to the way that he prepared his team. The last thing they could afford to do was turn the ball over and they did that. Without OLB T.J. Watt on the other side.
Tomlin was visibly emotional in his postgame remarks. He was nearing the end of his press conference, with head PR man Burt Lauten reaching the “Anyone else?” portion, the head coach probably ready to jog off the podium.
Then after a short period of silence, Brooke Pryor of ESPN began her inevitable question prefaced by the first half of a statement. “Mike, you have one year left on your contract…” was all she could get out before he quickly made for the exit.
I don’t blame him for it. I don’t blame her for bringing it up. It was the elephant in the room and sometimes reporters’ jobs involve asking questions they know they’re not going to get an answer to. And we know how much Tomlin loathes addressing his contract.
On top of that, sports media personalities have been fueling the speculation for weeks, months now, sometimes inaccurately. Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk erroneously claimed that this is the first time that the Steelers allowed Tomlin to enter the final year of his contract, when the reality is they did the same thing prior to his most recent extension.
He presented that data point to frame his interpretation that the supposedly new circumstance puts them in uncharted territory and thus makes it unpredictable what might happen. With all this in the background, at an emotionally charged state when he probably just wanted to get with his team, I really don’t think his walking off the stage meant anything more than “I have zero interest in dealing with this right now”.
