Eight teams will be playing football this weekend in the NFL. The Pittsburgh Steelers will not be one of them. That is all head coach Mike Tomlin cares about right now. That is why he abruptly left the stage in the aftermath of his team’s Wild Card Round loss to the Buffalo Bills when asked about his future.
He was fuming about where he found himself and not interested in that moment about where he would be going. A cooler head prevailed in the ensuing days, and Tomlin was able to make a joke about the situation at the start and close of his post-season press conference. But that didn’t make the abrupt transition into offseason mode any less galling.
“It all sucks. It does. It’s not degrees of suck. It all sucks”, he told reporters, via the team’s website. He was asked if it was in a way worse to be consistently middling rather than bottoming out altogether and getting better resources to rebuild.
“I’d rather be working. The thought of going to Mobile turns my stomach”, he said, referring to Senior Bowl practices as he begins draft preparation. “Not that I dislike Mobile, but I know what it’s like when you’re working and you’re not in Mobile. It’s a really good feeling to be in that tournament as the road gets narrow and to be living out the things that you aspire to live out over the last 12 months. And so, it’s not us, and it sucks”.
The Senior Bowl will take place in the first week of February. The Super Bowl will take place a week after that. Tomlin and his staff will have much more of a head start on that work than they would like. Instead of only sending scouts, he can now send coaches, including himself.
He is, after all, perhaps the most active head coach on the scouting circuit. He thrives in that environment. But it’s all in pursuit of having the opportunity to play football games in February. The last time Tomlin coached a game in February was in 2010. And he lost that game.
Just another degree of suck. And at a certain point, the degrees don’t matter. They all burn.
But how to step out of the inferno? Well, he’s been trying to figure that out for the past 15 years. He won his lone Super Bowl in 2008, his second year on the job. He has hardly come close to getting back to one in over a decade.
He’s got several pieces of the puzzle currently missing this offseason. The Steelers need to figure out who their next offensive coordinator is. They have to determine which of their coaches will remain on the staff. And they have to solve the riddle of the quarterback position. It is a tall task but a necessary one if he ever hopes to avoid another sucky end to a season.
