Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin hasn’t won a playoff game since 2016, and Steelers fans are getting restless. While Tomlin is widely respected as one of the best coaches in football, the perception of him in Pittsburgh is a lot different than in the rest of the country, and on FS1’s Breakfast Ball, Danny Parkins laid out some of the criticisms fans in Pittsburgh have of Tomlin. He added that if Steelers beat the Ravens on Saturday, no one will have “anything” to say about Tomlin.
“In Pittsburgh, there is definitely a mounting amount of criticism about Mike Tomlin,” Parkins said. “Why is your defense allowing 45 points to Blake Bortles in a playoff game? Why haven’t you won a playoff game since 2016? You only win when we’ve got a Hall of Fame quarterback that you inherited? Why can’t you hire an offensive coordinator and have continuity there? If he wins as nearly a 10-point underdog on the road against their hated division rival, no one in Pittsburgh will have anything to say about Mike Tomlin.”
The biggest knock on Tomlin is his lack of playoff success. With all the “The Standard is The Standard” talk, there hasn’t been much upholding of the standard in Pittsburgh. The Steelers should be competing in the AFC and making a playoff run year after year, not getting knocked out of the Wild Card round by inferior opponents like they did when they lost to Jacksonville in 2017 and Cleveland in 2020. So a win on the road in Baltimore, in a game where no one is giving the Steelers much of a chance would certainly quell some of the discourse around Tomlin.
Fair or not, given his playoff track record, a loss is going to bring back a lot more questions about whether Tomlin is the right coach to lead the Steelers to their seventh Lombardi Trophy. He’s likely not going anywhere, with a no-trade clause in his contract and a contract extension that runs through the 2027 season, a deal that signified the team’s faith in him. But after an offseason of wholesale changes to the team’s personnel, with a new quarterback and the most expensive free agent signing in team history, to end at 10-7 with a Wild Card Round loss for the second year in a row isn’t an outcome that anyone will be happy with.
A win would do a lot for Mike Tomlin to silence his critics, and he’s confident that the Steelers can get it done. They’ve beaten Baltimore before this season, albeit at home, but if the Steelers can pull off the road win, we’ll likely be saved from another week of discourse about whether Pittsburgh should trade its head coach.
