A few years ago, the great Peter King joined my radio show for his usual spot, and we talked about Mike Tomlin.
At that point, Tomlin’s playoff-win drought had reached six years or so. We agreed it was a major concern, but King opined that Tomlin always seemed to overachieve based on his rosters.
I pointed out that Tomlin was largely responsible for those rosters.
That’s what the national media so often overlooked in Tomlin’s tenure: He had enormous power over personnel — and he made some ruinous choices on his way to these records over the past five years, including the lopsided playoff losses:
10-8
10-8
10-8
9-8
9-7-1
If Tomlin’s teams “overachieved,” it wasn’t by much — the Pittsburgh Steelers haven’t come close to winning a playoff game in nearly a decade, after all — and nobody ever looked at why “overachieving” had become the annual theme around here.
Nobody ever seemed to ask the first important question: “Why is so little expected of the Pittsburgh Steelers anymore? Why is their Vegas over/under win total set around 8.5 every year?”
I’ll tell you why: because they weren’t very good, and one big reason they weren’t very good was because their all-powerful coach badly miscalculated on so many personnel moves, both on players and assistant coaches (Tomlin doubled down on Matt Canada, for goodness sake, and his coaching tree is the size of a dandelion).
Then, when the Steelers would barely eclipse .500 and either barely miss or barely make the playoffs and immediately get blown out, Tomlin was hailed as a miracle worker.
What do you expect, the national media would crow, Tomlin doesn’t have a quarterback!
The first obvious response would be, what did Tomlin do in recent years when he did have a quarterback? In the final decade of Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers went 3-7 in the playoffs. Their only serious run ended with a blowout loss in Foxborough in the 2016 AFC Championship game, and they have not come close to winning a playoff game since then.
The next point would be this: Tomlin, with final say on draft picks, thought Kenny Pickett was a great idea. That was 100% his pick. When that failed in spectacular fashion, combined with the Canada debacle, Tomlin should have been fired.
But that was never going to happen.
The Steelers rightfully became a coach-centric organization way back when Chuck Noll was hired and given final say on picks. You saw the dynamic play out when Bill Cowher won his power struggle with GM Tom Donahoe, as well. Aside from the owner, and sometimes even including the owner, the coach is the most powerful person in the organization.
That served them well for decades, but it’ll be interesting to see if the dynamic remains intact with the new coach, or if the Steelers adopt a model more in line with, say, the Philadelphia Eagles, who run a GM-centric organization and have their coaches — no matter how successful — on perpetual notice.
Anyway, Tomlin whiffed badly on Pickett and Najee Harris and could not control George Pickens. That was going to be his version of Aikman, Smith and Irvin — but Aikman, Smith and Irvin were never outscored 73-3 in the first quarters of playoff games, as Tomlin was over his last seven.
Aikman, Smith and Irvin never went 70 games in a row without scoring more than seven points in the first quarter, either.
The Pickett miss begat more Tomlin blunders at the most important position in sports — Mitch Trubisky, Justin Fields, Russell Wilson. Aaron Rodgers changed the pattern, but not really, helping Tomlin win the broken AFC North before suffering the worst home playoff loss in Steelers history.
A slew of first-round picks have failed to see a second contract, from Artie Burns to Pickett to Jarvis Jones, Harris, Terrell Edmunds, Devin Bush Jr. and now maybe Broderick Jones. So many of their acquisitions have busted over the years, the latest including Darius Slay and Juan Thornhill, who were supposed to be key pieces of what Tomlin predicted would be a historically great defense.
Yes, Tomlin had 19 consecutive non-losing seasons. But his brief playoff appearances over nearly a decade sure haven’t been non-losing. Average margin of defeat: more than two touchdowns.
Tomlin is 8-12 in the postseason and has tied Marvin Lewis for the longest playoff losing streak in pro football history. Art Rooney II spoke the other day of how Tomlin always had his team “in contention,” but the Steelers haven’t been a serious Super Bowl threat in years.
The crazy part is that Rooney was ready to run this back.
Did he expect something different?
