Mike Tomlin sent shockwaves through the NFL on Tuesday when he stepped away from the Pittsburgh Steelers. It ends his 19-year run with the franchise as head coach and puts the Steelers in a position where they will have to hire just their fourth head coach since the 1969 season.
From a big-picture perspective, Tomlin’s run with the Steelers was a massive success. But it was also time for both sides to go in a different direction.
Playoff losing streak shouldn’t outweigh overall success for Mike Tomlin
The most recent thing we saw from the Tomlin-era Steelers was a pretty sustained run of mediocrity, which ended with another thud on Monday night in a 30-6 wild-card loss to the Houston Texans.
It extended the Steelers’ playoff losing streak to six consecutive games and leaves Tomlin and the franchise without a playoff win since the 2016 season. That is a long time, and the longest playoff drought in Steelers franchise history.
Given the standard the Steelers have established for themselves since the 1970s, it was not good enough and a sign that things had started to become stale.
They settled into an area where they were a consistently above-average football team but never good enough to take the next step in the playoffs. Every season has looked exactly the same as the Steelers have rotated out quarterbacks, overhauled the roster and changed assistant coaches. They were never a bad team. They were consistently winning 10 games and making the playoffs. Then, they would get blown out in the playoffs.
Tomlin was the one constant through all of that.
The flaws also remained the same, specifically an offense that seemed too conservative and overly simplistic and a quarterback situation they could never get right.
All of it made it time for a change. Now, change is coming.
But that does not make his entire tenure with the team a failure or even disappointing. Objectively speaking, it was a massive success, especially as he had to take on the seemingly impossible job of replacing a Hall-of-Fame coach in Bill Cowher (who replaced another Hall-of-Fame coach in Chuck Noll).
Given the standard set by Noll and Cowher, it would have been understandable if the Tomlin era failed to match it. But he succeeded, and did so in a big way.
Since the start of the 2007 season, Tomlin’s first with the team, the Steelers’ 193 wins are the third-most in the NFL, trailing only the New England Patriots (209) and Green Bay Packers (195). They also appeared in three AFC Championship games (2008, 2010 and 2015) and two Super Bowls (2008 and 2010), winning one of them (2008). They are also the only franchise that had zero losing seasons over that stretch, while also finishing with at least 10 wins 11 different times. The list of franchises with more success over that time period can be counted on one hand while still having fingers left over at the end.
That is success. It may not have been as successful as the Steelers wanted at the end, but it is hard to ask for more from a franchise over 19 seasons.