Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin inherited a roster that had won a Super Bowl two years earlier. Nobody is happier to remind everyone of this fact than his detractors, yet we must also acknowledge the inevitable messiness of a team moving on from a franchise quarterback.
Tomlin had never steered the ship through such waters before until recently. For 15 years, he had Ben Roethlisberger upon which to rely, who offered a baseline level of performance. And we really should view the moves of this offseason in light of that new mindset that comes with ambiguity.
You have to take more swings when you’re looking for your franchise quarterback, which Tomlin is. And you’re going to whiff more often when you swing more often, inevitably, which means you’re going to move on more frequently. You’re going to make mistakes that you address sooner because you don’t have a quarterback masking the shortcomings. Especially so when the quarterback position is a big part of those shortcomings.
“I think what he’s saying, how he’s saying it, also the actions, to me all suggest this acknowledgement that he’s done some things wrong and the organization has done some things wrong recently”, Brooke Pryor told Randy Baumann on the DVE Morning Show yesterday. “I think that that’s something that we haven’t seen him say either in his words or actions in the past couple of years”.
Naturally, the Steelers have made some moves this offseason that are radical for them under Tomlin, most involving the quarterbacks. But again, Tomlin’s Steelers have never been in this boat before. You stop looking for a quarterback when you have one, but when you don’t, you never stop looking.
Of course, Tomlin also made the mistake of retaining Matt Canada as offensive coordinator. The reasoning at the time was to provide Kenny Pickett with some year-to-year consistency. That plan didn’t exactly work out, considering they fired him in-season—a clear acknowledgement of an error.
“The way that he’s acknowledging things and bringing in Arthur Smith for his football vision, as he said today, and bringing in [Justin] Fields and Russell Willson and trading Kenny Pickett away, it’s like he recognized that this organization needs a fresh start offensively”, Pryor said of Tomlin. “They have the defense figured out. There’s some holes to plug, but the defense is pretty much fine”.
Incidentally, the inside linebacker position is another that has been a revolving door for years. They hope to have solved that problem this offseason as well with Patrick Queen, the biggest free agent signing in team history in terms of total compensation and average annual salary.
We must also acknowledge the influence of a shakeup in the front office over the past two years. The Steelers replaced the semi-retired Kevin Colbert as general manager with Omar Khan, but so much else has changed besides. For one thing, they created the position of assistant general manager to hire Andy Weidl, which they’ve never had before.
Previously, in an era with a franchise quarterback, Tomlin valued staying the course and building upon strengths. In this current climate, he understands the importance of early diagnostics; if something isn’t working, do something about it. Your margin for error is too small to hope that stability patches everything up.
