Eighteen years at the helm of the Pittsburgh Steelers and counting, 18 straight years of non-losing seasons for head coach Mike Tomlin. It’s one of the more impressive feats in NFL coaching history.
Especially considering the Steelers have appeared to be a rudderless ship in the post-Ben Roethlisberger era. The 2025 season will mark the fifth straight year the Steelers will open the season with a new starting quarterback, going through Roethlisberger, Mitch Trubisky, Kenny Pickett and Justin Fields in the last four years.
Fields is with the New York Jets, and the belief is that Aaron Rodgers, at 41 years old, will be the Steelers’ QB in 2025.
Within that non-losing streak, Tomlin has received plenty of praise both locally and nationally for taking ill-equipped teams and finding ways to win, especially with poor QB play. To his credit, that’s what he’s done. Nobody is better at mudding up a game and finding a way to win than Tomlin’s Steelers, at least in the regular season.
But there’s one fundamental flaw in that belief that is driving the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s Tim Benz crazy. It’s the fact that Tomlin has a huge hand in the building of the roster and the decisions made recently at quarterback. During an appearance on “The Shek Show” with host Dave Dameshek, Benz stated that Tomlin gets credit for putting out fires that he starts, or in an apt comparison, keeping the Titanic afloat despite running the ship into the iceberg.
“I think people outside of Pittsburgh are finally starting to acknowledge it. I say it all the time that Mike Tomlin gets more credit than anybody else for putting out fires that he starts. Or if you wanna say he gets credit for keeping the Titanic afloat after he hit the iceberg. It’s just, we have to disassociate this notion from reality. And the notion is that he does whatever he does with the deck of cards that he’s handed, and that’s not true. He builds the deck,” Benz said, according to video via the show’s YouTube page. “He is very much at the helm of decision making when it comes to this team. I mean, we all love to throw praise at Tomlin for his care in the pre-draft process, and oh my God, no other head coach goes to all these pro days.
“Well, alright then you can’t just put the drafting on the front office if the drafting doesn’t go well. And I think a lot of national outlets do that. They refuse to associate Tomlin’s level of blame with how the [team] is constructed [and it] always seems to be somebody else’s fault.”
Benz has a great point here.
Yes, Tomlin does a solid job in the regular season of getting the most out of his team, winning games the Steelers have no business winning, and finding a way to have a non-losing record and getting into the playoffs. What other team can really say that following a transition from a Hall of Fame quarterback? Largely none.
Yet despite that success and that streak, Tomlin is just as much at fault for the roster issues as anyone. He loves to hit the Senior Bowl, is heavily involved in the NFL Combine meetings, and is always on the road for Pro Days. He loves football, that much is clear, and loves the process of roster building.
But time and time again, especially this offseason, we heard national media members criticizing the Steelers for not giving Tomlin a quarterback worthy of contending for a Super Bowl, as if Tomlin is a young coach with no real power within the organization.
It’s a disconnect from reality for those media members. Tomlin has a significant hand in the roster construct, regarding who is brought in, who is moved on from, and what players they tend to target in the draft. He’s not the be-all, end-all, but his voice and opinion carry great weight — as they should.
It’s high time though that Tomlin gets his fair share of criticism, too, especially nationally. That’s Benz’s whole point.
“We just credit Tomlin for getting it to 10 wins every year. And then when they lose in the playoffs, it’s always somebody else’s fault,” Benz said. “This year, I guess it’s the quarterback, or previously was the offensive coordinator. Then again, he hired the offensive coordinator. Hired the offensive coordinator this time, too. Hires all of his staff. But there’s always this cognitive dissonance between what Tomlin is all about when it comes to being an all-encompassing coach and a hands-on guy and in complete control and complete charge until something goes wrong and it’s somebody else’s fault. And that tends to drive me a little insane.”
It’s a little bit of having your cake and eating it too when it comes to Tomlin. He gets all the credit in the world for taking lacking rosters like he’s had in recent years and finding a way to be competitive. It’s always discussed as if Tomlin is a miracle worker.
Yet it very rarely is acknowledged that Tomlin has a huge hand in putting those rosters that are seemingly lacking together. That can’t be the case moving forward.
