Fresh off his first Super Bowl win, you could say Nick Sirianni is this era’s Mike Tomlin. The young head coach who found near-immediate success, Sirianni’s had one of the best starts to a head coaching career with a 48-20 record and Super Bowl ring. Just as Tomlin did his first four seasons in Pittsburgh, 43-21 over that span, with his own Lombardi.
Fast forwarding to today where Sirianni is the hot-shot coach and Tomlin the elder statesman, the longest-tenured head coach in football, ESPN’s Unsportsmanlike panel debated who is better.
“I know I love Mike Tomlin more than anyone. Nick Sirianni in the last four years has been significantly more successful than Mike,” co-host Evan Cohen said.
Over the last four years, Tomlin is 38-29-1 with two playoff appearances and zero postseason victories. Pittsburgh hasn’t won a playoff game in the last eight seasons under his helm, the team’s longest such drought of the post-merger era. Sirianni turned around a team that went 4-11-1 the year before him and made the playoffs as a rookie head coach. Like Tomlin, the Eagles made the Super Bowl his second season though unlike Tomlin, Philadelphia came up short. After watching his team collapse in 2023 similar to Pittsburgh in 2024, the Eagles bounced back and dominated in 2024, blowing out the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
Still, that impressive resume didn’t convince everyone.
“Mike Tomlin has not had a quarterback,” said Chris Canty. “If you give Nick Sirianni Mason Rudolph and Duck Hodges or Kenny Pickett, what you think that season gonna look like?”
There’s no question Eagles GM Howie Roseman is in charge of the roster and has built one of the best ones in football. But Tomlin’s comparative lack of talent falls on him, the most influential roster-building name in the organization. It’s Tomlin’s job to find a quarterback and though that’s far easier said than done, failing to do so at least partially falls on him. The Eagles had the right vision and execution for how to build their team. The Steelers might have the vision but they’ve fallen far short.
In an exercise Dave Bryan and I did for a recent podcast, we both placed Sirianni ahead of Tomlin and both had him ranked in the 8-9 range. We debated over a couple of names; I ranked the Los Angeles Chargers’ Jim Harbaugh ahead of Tomlin while Dave convinced me to put Green Bay’s Matt LaFleur ahead of him, too.
“I don’t think he’s a better coach than Andy Reid,” Canty said of Sirianni. “I don’t think he’s a better coach than Sean McVay. I don’t think he’s a better coach than Mike Tomlin, and I don’t think he’s a better coach than Jim Harbaugh. And I don’t think he’s a better coach than Sean Payton.”
Super Bowls and single-season snapshots can make for prisoners of the moment. Reacting too significantly to what one year and one Lombardi means. After all, they define legacy. But Sirianni isn’t a flash in the pan. And four seasons of sustained success with two Super Bowl trips, one ring, and dealing with the heat of a Philadelphia media market that questioned Sirianni’s future even in the middle of a successful season, it’s fair to list him ahead of the head coach currently leading a stagnant team that is miles away from its next Super Bowl trip.
