Size doesn’t matter to the Pittsburgh Steelers, at least when it comes to their coaching staff. While they purportedly have among the smallest in the league, they don’t seem to mind that others’ are bigger. In fact, earlier this offseason, president Art Rooney II dismissed any notion that their size was inadequate. Some believe he is in denial, while others insist he is too cheap to spend to correct the issue.
ESPN reporter Brooke Pryor takes the latter view, and in fact views it as one of the Steelers’ biggest flaws.
“I think that that has been a huge problem the Steelers have had across the board,” she said on the Locked on Steelers podcast. “They are just unwilling to spend the money to make meaningful changes.”
“When Art Rooney II says, ‘We don’t anticipate any significant coaching changes, not gonna be a bunch of big shakeups’, and then is pretty resistant to the idea of hiring other assistant coaches,” she continued, “it tells me the Steelers say, ‘We’re fine being stuck in the past. Everyone else is hiring more assistants, but we don’t need this’. That’s fine, but then you’re not going to change. You’re not going to move out of this cycle of mediocrity.”
I tend not to agree, at least with the premise that it’s a matter of money. I think the size and notoriety of the Steelers’ coaching staff has very little to do with the men who sign the checks. Rooney defers to HC Mike Tomlin on most things football, including his staff, with rare interventions. And Tomlin is on record as preferring a smaller coaching staff.
The size of the Steelers’ coaching staff has been a topic for a while now, detractors pointing out that teams like the Eagles have a larger staff. These same people never point out that Bill Belichick always had a coaching staff typically even smaller than the Steelers’, though.
Alex Kozora has been tallying the size of NFL coaching staffs for a few years, and there isn’t a great deal of correlation between size and success. The Dolphins and Raiders tend to have the largest, for example, the Bills and Lions on the smaller side. The Steelers are always on the smaller side, but they don’t hire for the sake of hiring.
Tomlin will add the right coach to his Steelers staff if the opportunity presents itself. He hired Teryl Austin as a senior assistant, for example, later doing the same with Brian Flores. Rather than parting with Mike Sullivan, he transitioned to a senior assistant role in 2024.
None of this is to say that the Steelers have some Goldilocks coaching staff, or that adding additional coaches couldn’t be beneficial. But it is to say that simply increasing the size of the coaching staff does nothing to make anything better. The Steelers’ coaching staff is under scrutiny because they’re struggling to do their jobs, not because there isn’t enough of them. And hiring more people who can’t do their job solves nothing. By all means, add a pass game coordinator or something, but only do so if it makes sense.
