He hasn’t won a playoff game since 2016, but he does have an impressive streak of 18 straight seasons without a losing season in his career. That streak of non-losing seasons and his reputation as one of the best coaches in the NFL overall has Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach Mike Tomlin sitting in the top 5 of the Fox Sports rankings of all head coaches entering the NFL playoffs.
According to Fox Sports reporter Ralph Vacchiano and his rankings, taking a crack at ranking the 14 head coaches that led their teams to the playoffs this season, Tomlin checks in at No. 5. Shockingly, Vacchiano ranked Minnesota’s Kevin O’Connell — the likely Coach of the Year in the NFL — dead last.
Tomlin landed at No. 5 behind Kansas City’s Andy Reid, Denver’s Sean Payton, Los Angeles’ Jim Harbaugh, and Los Angeles’ Sean McVay.
“If you’re listing the best coaches of the last two decades, he’d be in the group right behind Andy Reid and Bill Belichick on that list. No one has been consistently better, with no losing seasons and 12 trips to the playoffs in his 18 years,” Vacchiano writes of Tomlin in his head coach rankings. “He gets the most out of his players and is a brilliant game-day coach who took a team quarterbacked by Kenny Pickett to the playoffs last season and coaxed 10 wins out of the Justin Fields-Russell Wilson combo this year. The lone knock is that it’s been 14 years since his last trip to the Super Bowl and he hasn’t had a lot of recent playoff success.
“They’ve been one-and-done in six of their last eight trips and haven’t won a playoff game since 2016. This year’s late collapse doesn’t help his ranking either.”
While Tomlin does a nice job of winning games and getting some teams that really had no business into the playoffs in recent years, the fact that he’s gone one and done so many times since 2016 is the biggest knock on him, and rightfully so.
He’s considered a master motivator and knows how to push all of the right buttons to get the most out of guys. But lately he’s been out-schemed, out-coached and comes up small in big games. Yes, he finds ways to win in the regular season, but once the bright lights are on in the playoffs, his teams are often getting blown out in ugly fashion and winding up at home quickly time and time again.
The close to what once looked like a very promising season for the Black and Gold has many frustrated with Tomlin once again, too. The Steelers have lost four straight and are backing into the playoffs, playing their worst football. Once again, December struggles have popped up, and the Steelers haven’t been able to figure a way out of it.
That falls on Tomlin. He has the resume to be considered one of the best coaches of his generation, but the last decade hasn’t been all that kind to him, especially in the postseason. He has a chance to get back on the right side of things in the Wild Card round against the Ravens, a familiar foe. But right now, it’s hard to feel good about anything Steelers related.
