The Steelers could slap “co-general manager” to the end of Mike Tomlin’s title and nothing would be amiss. As much as perhaps any head coach in the NFL, he plays a fundamental role in the Steelers’ roster-building process. If a player is on the 53-man roster, you can be pretty confident Tomlin wants to have him there. Even former Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger said as much.
It might not always work out, and perhaps at times he relents and lets himself be outweighed by other powers that be. But, on the whole, when the Steelers take the field, they are team of Tomlin-approved players. Which, to Brooke Pryor, makes the annual praise of his ability to do more with less so fascinating.
Appearing on Dave Dameshek’s Shek Show to discuss the state of the Steelers, ESPN’s beat writer for the team didn’t pull punches in diagnosing what ails the organization. Pryor said that Tomlin is too comfortable, as is the organization as a whole. And she compared Tomlin to a contestant on the cooking show Chopped, complete with mystery ingredients.
“He does a great job. The thing is, it’s not a mystery basket. He is the one that’s going grocery shopping”, she argued. “It feels like this is Mike Tomlin’s show. In a lot of ways, he creates the problem and then he solves it and then he gets credit for solving it without a lot of acknowledgement that, ‘Well, you’re in this problem because you had a hand in it’”.
The Steelers go on record virtually every year to discuss how their decision-making process works. Even former Steelers HC Bill Cowher talked about it over a decade ago. Mike Tomlin is as instrumentally involved in the personnel decisions as president Art Rooney II and GM Omar Khan. Generally speaking, they work to form a consensus on players, but it can’t always work so perfectly. Yet is a team that has basically given Tomlin a lifetime appointment going to try to make him coach players he doesn’t want?
Pryor argued that Tomlin’s “almost what feels like unchecked power” is at the root of many of the Steelers’ issues. She continued in saying that his power feels even more unchecked since former GM Kevin Colbert retired. Current GM Omar Khan doesn’t have nearly the personnel background, though the Steelers did add assistant GM Andy Weidl.
One thing the Steelers certainly do not do is put together a roster without a thought as to what Mike Tomlin wants. After all, you’d be hard-pressed to find a player they sign who doesn’t have a personal Tomlin story. Tomlin is one of the main draws for players to come here, and he is also the one who believes he can get the best out of everybody.
But, often, he can’t. So when it comes to praising Mike Tomlin for doing more with less, remember who gave himself less. He has as much to do with the Steelers’ roster weaknesses as anybody else does. If he lacks a roster with which to win division titles and playoff games, that’s because he made evaluation mistakes.
