When it comes to coaching achievements, Jeff Fisher may not be the name you most desire to be associated with. Though he had quite a long coaching career, the reality is that much of it was mediocre or worse. He reached the postseason just six times in 22 years as a head coach. Indeed, he has the worst winning percentage of all head coaches in NFL history with more than 130 wins at .512.
But he also has the 12th-most wins in NFL history at 173, and now he has company as Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin joins him. Going 10-7 on the 2023 season, Tomlin has now secured another non-losing season, another playoff season, and another season with 10-plus wins.
The difference between Fisher and Tomlin can be explained in the amount of games it took them to get to 173 wins. Fisher coached 339 games. Tomlin has coached 275. That’s a 64-game difference to win the same number of times. Fisher has 65 more losses (with one tie to Tomlin’s two).
Fisher finished below .500 in 11 of his 22 seasons, with only six winning records and five .500 records, yet he managed to go 13-3 no fewer than three times. That included the 2008 season in which the Baltimore Ravens knocked the Titans out during the Divisional Round following their bye week, allowing Tomlin’s Steelers to avoid the top seed and playing on the road en route to his one and only Super Bowl win. Tomlin, you may be interested to know, has no losing seasons, and 14 winning seasons.
Tomlin’s .633 winning percentage remains 10th-best among head coaches who won at least 100 games, a plateau that he cleared many years ago. Among those names above whom he ranks currently are Curly Lambeau, Sean Payton, Bill Cowher, Bud Grant, Joe Gibbs, Mike McCarthy, John Harbaugh, Tom Landry, and Steve Owen.
The Steelers head coach managed to leap several spots on the all-time wins list this season, but he will have to wait a while for his next climb up the chart. The next name ahead of him is Chuck Knox with 186 all-time wins, so Tomlin would need to go at least 14-3 in 2024 in order to surpass him.
Tomlin and Bill Parcells, it may be worth mentioning, are the only two head coaches to have coached fewer than 20 seasons while recording 170 or more wins. That doesn’t mean others didn’t do it—they just went on to coach for at least three more seasons, as Tomlin is likely to.
And assuming that he does, he should be able to reach 200 career wins, averaging nine wins per season. If he coaches for the next three years averaging at least a 9-8 record, he will become only the ninth NFL head coach to win 200 games. At 73 games above .500 for his career, he ranks ninth in that mark as well.
His 10 seasons appearing in the postseason are tied for the 14th-most in NFL history, along with Harbaugh and others, though he ranks only 20th in total postseason games and 25th in postseason wins. He is one of 35 head coaches to have won a Super Bowl and would really like to become the 15th to win more than one. Only four men, including Chuck Noll, have won three or more.
