It’s time yet again to make one thing very clear about how the Pittsburgh Steelers organization is run. They truly live by the idea that the standard is the standard. And they’ve never been bashful about what the standard is. The standard we’re referring to is the standard of expectation. Head coach Mike Tomlin reiterated that during his end-of-season press conference Thursday.
“We want to be world champions. Every year we build with that intention”, he said, via the team’s website. “We’re not this year, so there’s disappointment obviously with that. There’s consequences of that. We’re really just at the beginning stages of assessing the why and then continually plotting a course to move forward. Those will be our intentions in 2024, to be world champions”.
That is what they mean when they say the standard is the standard. The standard is Super Bowls, every year. They’ll never bottom out and tank. The standard of expectation, that is. Everything they do strives toward that goal, that ambition, that expectation of winning the next championship. They tried this season. They didn’t make it.
“I’m not looking to seek comfort. We wanted to be world champs. The tournament is still ongoing and we’re not in it”, Tomlin said when he was asked about what goals he did accomplish with his team during the 2023 season.
“From that perspective, we fell short”, he continued. “I’m less concerned about some of the boxes we checked and really I’m just at the information gathering stage of all of this in an effort to position ourselves where we’re not having this conversation 12, 13 months from now”.
The thing about standards of expectation is that they’re impossible to achieve. They’re supposed to be. Nobody is going to win the Super Bowl every single year. You might win it occasionally. You might be consistently competitive. Everybody knows there will be years where you fall short. Most years, in fact. The vast majority of years.
The question becomes how closely the standard of execution aligns with the standard of expectation. The standard of execution under Tomlin’s watch for the past decade has left something to be desired. While the Steelers are consistently competitive in the regular season, his first-round exits in the postseason continue to mount. He now has the second-most in modern playoff history behind only Marty Schottenheimer.
Sure, that might mean that he is in the running a lot. But so have a lot of other coaches who haven’t had such poor results. Tomlin would be the first to acknowledge it. Just before their playoff loss to the Buffalo Bills, he talked about not expecting his players to tote his own playoff baggage.
These comments from Tomlin are far from isolated examples. He’s been saying the same things at the end of every season where the standard of execution falls short of the standard of expectation. That’s what “The Standard” is there for. It’s a guidepost. It lets you know where you need to get to, and, depending on where you are, how much further you have to go.
