Mike Tomlin’s Playoff Record Is Getting Uglier

The Pittsburgh Steelers are sitting at home this weekend, watching the final eight teams battle it out in the Divisional Round of the NFL playoffs. It comes as no surprise and the rule more than the exception. Since their last Super Bowl appearance in 2011, the Steelers have played on Divisional Weekend only three times. Twice, they lost, falling to Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos in 2015 and upset by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2017. In 2016, they bested the Kansas City Chiefs before getting bounced by Tom Brady’s New England Patriots (again) in the Championship round.

Those losses and many Wild Card defeats (2011, 2014, 2020, 2021, and 2023) have severely damaged Mike Tomlin’s playoff record. He’s now 8-10 in the postseason, a figure that doesn’t look good on the surface and even worse compared to his peers.

Of the 14 active NFL head coaches with at least five postseason appearances, Tomlin’s .444 postseason record percentage, ranks 11th. Here’s the list from best to worst. I only included current head coaches or names likely to be head coaches in 2024, keeping Bill Belichick and Mike Vrabel even if they’re technically still free agents. This excluded Pete Carroll (whose .500 record is better than Tomlin’s) and Ron Rivera (whose .375 record is not).

These figures include Saturday’s playoff results but not Sunday’s, though none of the coaches today can fall behind Tomlin even with a loss (Sean McDermott will stay slightly ahead if the Bills lose to the Chiefs).

UPDATE: I updated these numbers to reflect the Chiefs beating the Bills today and Andy Reid’s/Sean McDermott’s playoff records.

Cincinnati Bengals’ head coach Zac Taylor edges out Bill Belichick for the top spot of this list, though Belichick has coached in far more postseason games and his 31-13 record is just absurd (having QB Tom Brady helps, I know).

Right now, the only records Tomlin bests are LaFleur, Sirianni, and Vrabel. That’s a list of; a Packers team on the rise, one coach nearly (and still possibly) fired and one actually canned. With Tomlin, those are currently the only four sub-.500 playoff coaches in the league with at least five games under their belt.

Panning out to league history, of coaches with at least 10 playoff appearances, only six have a worse record than Tomlin: Steve Owen, Marty Schottenheimer, Paul Brown, Dennis Green, Chuck Knox, and John Robinson. There’s some great coaches on that list, Owen and Brown who are partly or entirely part of the pre-merger days (Brown’s playoff failures mostly came with the Bengals in the early 70s). But the post-mergers ones are either largely forgotten or remembered for their lack of playoff success, like Schottenheimer. 

Tomlin began with a strong playoff record. After his first four seasons, he was 5-2 with a ring on his finger. Heck, even after the 2016 season, he was a respectable 8-6. But Pittsburgh’s dropped their last four, haven’t won a postseason game in seven years, and Tomlin’s record now sits two games under .500.

Winning in the NFL is hard. I don’t want to undersell that. In this one-and-done format, there’s no margin for error. For most coaches, a “good” year is going 1-1 in the playoffs, winning a game before getting bounced. Maintain at that .500 level and you’ll have a job for a long time. But Tomlin is trending in the wrong direction over the latter half of his coaching career. In many ways, his coaching arc is that of his NFL mentor, Tony Dungy. Great leaders, fantastic teachers, defensive-minded coaches who got their start young (Tomlin 34, Dungy 40) who have awesome regular season records and that one magical Super Bowl run.

But Dungy’s also remembered for arguably not doing enough with a Hall of Famer QB like Peyton Manning, always had trouble with Belichick’s Patriots in the playoffs, and Dungy ended his career with a sub-.500 postseason record, 9-10.

Tomlin’s trending on a similar path. It won’t wreck or ruin his legacy but it will, to a degree, taint it, if he can’t find future playoff successes. He has time, showing no signs of his energy or desire to coach weakening, and all it takes is the stars aligning for one great playoff run for the tide to turn. Right now though? Tomlin is headed towards having one of the worst playoff records of long-tenured coaches in NFL history.