We Like Our Coach. Don't Love Him.

What should the Steelers do?

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Fun fact alert. The Pittsburgh Steelers:

—Have been owned by the same family since their inception in 1933.

—Have won the Super Bowl six times, tied with the Patriots for most rings ever. But!

—Haven’t won it all since the 2008-09 season.

—Have not had a losing season in more than 20 years. But!

—Haven’t won a playoff game in eight years.

—Have not fired a head coach since LBJ was president.

—(LBJ was president for a good chunk of the 1960s.)

—(His full name was Lyndon Baines Johnson. Tremendous dead-president name.)

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Generally good. Very stable. Not quite good enough. Possibly too stable.

The Steelers have a problem right now, this very minute. The problem is multi-fold, so I suppose they’ve got a few problems, not just one. But their primary issue is this: They don’t fire head coaches, and yet they might really need to.

After falling to Baltimore 28-14 in the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs last weekend, the Steelers are scrambling again. They were 10-3 at one point, then lost four straight to end the regular season and got predictably run over by a Ravens team that is awfully tough to beat at home. But Pittsburgh shouldn’t have been on the road in the first place, considering the team’s hot start. They ran aground.

Mike Tomlin has coached this franchise since 2007 — and he’s still only 52 years old. In the 2008 season, his second year on the job, Tomlin’s Steelers won the Super Bowl. They made another appearance two seasons later. Since then, bupkis.

Or rather, not bupkis — just not great. The Steelers have hit double-digit victories eight times since 2010. They played for an AFC championship once. I know plenty of franchises that would gladly and gratefully switch places. But recently, and in a pronounced way, the Steelers have slid into a pattern of playing pretty decent regular seasons, then going one-and-done in the playoffs. They are no longer a credible threat. They’re a good team that you don’t mind facing in the post-season.

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Did Tomlin get worse at his job? That is unreasonable. But it is reasonable to speculate that a regularly-winning coach might, over time, become more firmly convicted as to what he thinks his teams should look and play like. After all, they do win games.

And that is always, always a dangerous road in a league as dynamic as the NFL.

The Steelers run a no-frills, low-risk offense, and they rely on their defense to win a lot of the time. I mean, they went with Russ Wilson at quarterback this season. They weren’t trying anything new or unpredictable; they went for staid.

So yes, mindset is part of the issue. What else is different about the Steelers’ franchise since their last playoff win? A writer for The Athletic, Mike Sando, does a great job of explaining this in detail. The link is behind a paywall, alas, but here’s the short of it:

The owner.

The GM.

The quarterback.

The Rooney family still controls the club, but day to day operation has been passed down from founder Art Rooney to son Dan to, now, a grandson, Art II. The grandson took over in 2017. The franchise QB, Ben Roethlisberger, began a slow decline shortly thereafter, missed a bunch of time because of injury, and retired after the 2021 season.

The GM who was the architect of the most recent winning, Kevin Colbert, called it quits after 2021 as well. But Colbert, who had drafted Big Ben in 2004, stayed around long enough to draft his putative franchise-QB replacement, Kenny Pickett, in the summer of ‘22. That selection was, for several reasons, a graphic fail.

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With 18 years as head coach, Mike Tomlin is being asked to carry the institutional memory of the Steeler Way of doing things almost by himself, but he’s surrounded by a cast that hasn’t filled the shoes of its predecessors. Meanwhile, it appears that Tomlin’s own grind-it-out approach to football doesn’t really resonate with contemporary talent.

The Steelers are stuck. They’re good enough to factor, but not good enough to matter. And they are a ship that is incredibly slow to turn. The Rooneys, father to son to grandson, have had three head coaches — total — since 1968: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Tomlin.

That is a remarkable statistic. It sure isn’t the statistic that most franchises chase, but it apparently still means something to the Rooney family; the word out of Pittsburgh on Monday was that Tomlin won’t be traded or fired this off-season. On they grind.

It’s an odd place to be in pro sports — good but not great. Getting to good usually implies that “great” is out there somewhere, pretty close, maybe, with this adjustment or that alteration of strategy. The Steelers either can’t find it or have plain forgotten where to look.

They could use a quarterback, you bet. They need a new coach — or a new look from their old one — even more.

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