Under head coach Mike Tomlin, the Pittsburgh Steelers have been a pillar of consistency. We are all familiar with the stat about Tomlin having the longest streak of non-losing seasons to begin a head coaching career in league history. And it’s impressive. That’s why there are plenty of people in league circles who are Tomlin supporters. That list even includes current New York Jets WR Davante Adams.
But Tomlin might also be his own worst enemy. That level of success, and it certainly is success, means the Steelers are always drafting in the back half of the first round of the NFL draft. That can limit how easily a team can replace a Super Bowl-winning quarterback like Ben Roethlisberger. And the Steelers certainly have struggled to replace him. And former NFL WR (and Pennsylvania native) Andrew Hawkins thinks Tomlin’s abilities as a head coach are partly to blame.
“The reality is he’s too good of a coach to get a quarterback that he needs to contend in the AFC,” said Hawkins on Tuesday’s episode of NFL Live on ESPN. “It’s going to go through Burrow, Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, or Patrick Mahomes. So if you don’t have one of those guys, it’s going to be very, very difficult to get over this hump… You’re too good of a coach to ever be in position to get anybody close to that.”
Since Mike Tomlin became the Steelers head coach, Pittsburgh has had a top-10 draft pick once. That was in 2019, and they traded up from 20th overall to select LB Devin Bush. We don’t need to dissect that pick other than to say the Steelers simply don’t draft in the top 10. In fact, they’ve only drafted in the top 15 picks two other times. And both of those times were because they traded up in the draft.
So the Steelers just do not find themselves in prime quarterback draft territory due to their record. That’s a sign that the Steelers, on average, play good football. But they play too good for an easy crack at a franchise quarterback.
That’s why Dan Orlovsky thinks the Steelers will need to channel those previous trade-ups during Tomlin’s era. But he acknowledges that would be a big shift for the franchise.
“The only real way to fix it is to have the Steelers do something which they’ve really never done,” said Orlovsky. “And that’s take assets in the draft to move up to go get a quarterback… The question is gonna be this: Are you willing as an organization to start a new philosophy, to start a new thought process of how you go about doing things? ‘Cause if you don’t, crossing your fingers to get an elite franchise quarterback at the 24th pick is just unrealistic.”
Now, we can certainly point to franchise quarterbacks who have been taken outside of the top 10. The Steelers just lost to the Baltimore Ravens, and they took QB Lamar Jackson with the 32nd overall pick in 2018. The Philadelphia Eagles took QB Jalen Hurts in the second round in 2020. And everybody will gladly point to the New England Patriots taking Tom Brady in the sixth round. You can even bring up San Francisco 49ers QB Brock Purdy, who was Mr. Irrelevant, the final pick in the 2022 NFL Draft. Mike Tomlin will gladly make this argument as he did during his end-of-season press conference.
But do you want to try to build your franchise on outliers? Or do you want to give yourself the best shot of figuring out the post-Ben Roethlisberger era? Because as it stands now, the Steelers under Mike Tomlin won’t organically be picking high enough to take a true swing at a franchise quarterback.
