The Pittsburgh Steelers have far exceeded almost anybody’s expectations through the first nine games of the 2024 season. Currently at 7-2, they are first in the AFC North, and it is starting to become clear that they have a chance to compete deep into the playoffs. Head coach Mike Tomlin deserves all the praise in the world for the job he is doing this season, and he is starting to receive just that.
“I’m old enough to remember, I don’t know, two years ago, when the folks in Pittsburgh wanted Mike Tomlin out of there. We heard fire Mike Tomlin left and right,” Mike Greenberg said on ESPN’s Get Up. “Listen, Mike Tomlin is coach of the year in the NFL right now. And that’s it, that’s the end of the conversation. Dan Campbell is having an unbelievable year and so are many others, but no one is doing more with less than Mike Tomlin. No one is coaching a team better than Mike Tomlin is coaching.”
Tomlin is in his 18th season as the Steelers’ head coach and has never won AP NFL Coach of the Year. This could very well be the year that he gets to add that accolade to his impressive resume.
“He is Tomlining this team all the way to what is right now an inexplicable first place in their division,” Greenberg said.
The Steelers have gone 17-9 since the start of the 2023 season with five different starting quarterbacks. Five starting quarterbacks in such a short period of time would typically mean deep issues for a franchise, but Tomlin has kept the team together. The Steelers haven’t just weathered the storm, they have excelled and overperformed.
Nearly everybody was calling for Tomlin to continue with Justin Fields after a 4-2 start, but that didn’t stop him from trying to discover if his good team could be great. He was willing to make himself look very bad to find out, and it paid off with Wilson now 3-0 and elevating this team to Super Bowl-contender status.
People will point to the fake punt yesterday, which could have proven very costly, as a misstep for Tomlin. I actually think it was a good call since they were playing aggressively in an effort to secure a win against a good opponent on the road. The same mindset that gave us the botched fake punt also gave us the fourth-down conversion at a critical spot of the game.
Tomlin scraped by with rough quarterback situations for the past five years. We are now being reminded of what it looks like when he has a good one.
