There was some very short-lived speculation the last few days that Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin would not return to coach the team next season and take a year off coaching. While Tomlin reportedly told his players he will be back next season, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio thinks the Steelers may have made a mistake by not signing Tomlin to an extension before the 2023 season, the second-to-last year on his current contract.
“The Steelers may have F’d around and found out by not signing him before the start of the 2023 season. We know one of the Steelers’ rules, long-standing rule, no contract discussions with anyone once the season begins. That may have put them in a little bit of a jam here because now he can see the finish line,” Florio said on PFT Live today.
For a head coach, job security is the most important thing you can have. The Steelers are notorious for not firing coaches, usually just letting them walk after their contract expires, and they’ve only had three head coaches since 1969. Both of Tomlin’s predecessors in Chuck Noll and Bill Cowher retired, but for Tomlin, not having his contract extended early may have gave him some pause about how he’s thought of in the upper rungs of the organization.
However, before the season, owner Art Rooney II said the Steelers would get an extension done with Tomlin “when it needs to get done,” and said he expected Tomlin to be in Pittsburgh beyond his current contract. Given Pittsburgh’s track record and Tomlin’s track record, there was no real reason to believe either would move on. The lack of recent playoff success is troubling and it’s surely something that the Rooney family is aware of and probably not too thrilled with, but Tomlin has been in Pittsburgh since 2007 and has never really been at risk of getting fired.
Still, Florio is speculating that not having a contract in hand may have made Tomlin at least more aware of other opportunities, in terms of “seeing the finish line,” with his current contract expiring after the 2024 season. With Tomlin returning next season, the team is likely going to extend him, and Jason La Canfora said yesterday they want to do a long-term extension with Tomlin, while Florio said during the season the team wanted to extend him.
Florio’s initial report came after Pittsburgh’s three-game losing streak, which included back-to-back losses to 2-10 teams, so it doesn’t really seem as if Tomlin’s job was really in any jeopardy. Of course, if he was frustrated about not getting a new contract that news would have spread and led to the insider speculation we got from Jay Glazer, whom Tomlin is close with, in addition to Adam Schefter.
At the end of the day, if Tomlin gets an extension this offseason, the point of the Steelers “f’ing around and finding out” is pretty moot. If them “finding out” was just a bunch of speculation that he might leave, I don’t really think the Rooney family or the Steelers were concerned about the outside noise. If there was a real possibility he was going to leave, it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, but the Steelers certainly aren’t going to change the way they’ve done business for decades for one person.
Watch the full segment with Florio on Tomlin and the Steelers below.
