How in God’s Name Does a Legendary NFL Coach Have His Bad Team Winning So Much?

An incongruence has developed in the past few years around Mike Tomlin, the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers for 17 years. It goes something like this: Listen to a call-in radio show on the Western Pennsylvania airwaves, and you will get the impression that Tomlin is a mediocrity who doesn’t deserve his chair at the head of one of the NFL’s legacy franchises. But watch NFL players gravitate toward Tomlin, or listen to NFL coaches talk about how he practices his craft, and you will get a different idea: that Tomlin is Vince Lombardi reincarnate, but with more personality.

This season has brought a different but related contradiction. The statistic becomes part of Tomlin’s legend with every passing week: The Steelers do not win football’s territorial fight, but they win the game. They were the first team in NFL history to be outgained in yards in each of their first eight games and post a winning record in the process. Now they are the first team to be outgained in each of their first nine games and still sit above .500. They are 6–3, right in the thick of the AFC playoff race with even a bit of margin for error. Tomlin bears responsibility for fielding a team that cannot move the ball or stop its opponent from doing so on a regular basis. He also bears responsibility for winning anyway, which is what Tomlin does every year. The other stat that’s key to his legend is that he has coached zero losing seasons.

Tomlin is a fitting coach to oversee a mediocre team that has one of football’s best records. It wouldn’t be a Mike Tomlin year if it didn’t produce red meat for arguments about whether he’s the reason for the Steelers’ success, failure, or both. Everyone’s right enough: Tomlin is stubborn, and he’s responsible for myriad Steelers underachievements during his tenure. He’s also one of the best football coaches who’s ever lived and the best in the business right now if one judges a coach by their ability to get any group of 53 players ready for one game on one Sunday in a vacuum. Tomlin is both a pain in his own ass and a legend.

People who know football hold Tomlin in the highest regard possible. Matt LaFleur, the Green Bay Packers’ head coach, told reporters last week that Tomlin is “the model of consistency in this league.” He added, “If you ask any player, any coach in the league, I don’t think there’s anybody that’s not gonna respect him.” Usually, someone can spot this sentiment in postgame handshakes, when opposing players seek out Tomlin in a way reminiscent of the incoming that Tom Brady enjoyed in his final years in the league. Another common sighting is ex-Steelers giving media interviews in which they talk about what they gleaned from Tomlin. Joshua Dobbs, the journeyman backup who’s currently the toast of the Twin Cities for his effective fill-in work with the Vikings, says Tomlin taught him about the urgency of meeting ridiculous circumstances. Other ex-players talk fawningly about how Tomlin matter-of-factly motivates his troops and offers unsparing feedback on their performance. A few years ago, he won a poll of Pro Bowlers who said he was the coach, other than their own, that they would most like to have leading them. Tomlin has managed a bunch of strong-willed, eccentric, and dare I say lousy personalities with the Steelers, and he has always prevented his team from collapsing in on itself.

Add to those personal traits that Tomlin always wins more games than he loses and won a Super Bowl in 2009, and it’s just not credible to regard Tomlin as anything other than an all-time coach. What he’s doing with a pretty bleak Steelers team this year is astonishing. As purely a matter of coaching—taking the players you’ve got and winning games with them despite their flaws—it’s one of the best stretches anyone’s ever done. And Tomlin should get extra credit because the Steelers have missed several of their best players for extended blocks of this season, which is now halfway over. That is nothing new for him; in 2019 he had the Steelers in the playoff race until the last week of the season despite someone named Devlin “Duck” Hodges starting at quarterback for six of the 16 games. Mason Rudolph started eight, and his most notable highlight was the Browns’ Myles Garrett bashing him in the head with a helmet. Nobody gets more out of what he’s got than Tomlin, and it’s likely nobody ever will.

Tomlin has always had detractors, to an extent that has felt, to me, out of step with his constant status as one of football’s winningest coaches. The oldest, most boring attack on Tomlin is the one that takes Tomlin’s mutual respect for his players and makes it into a racist pejorative. Tomlin addressed that explicitly in 2014, talking about the label of being a “player’s coach” in an industry known for authoritarianism. “Sometimes it’s close and cuddly, and sometimes it’s not. I don’t have any problem being any of the above. Sometimes when they couple ‘players’ coach’ with questions about how I wear my hair or what I choose to wear on the sidelines or what type of music I listen to, then it gets kind of old and falls into that category for me,” he said.

Growing up in Pittsburgh during Tomlin’s early years on the job, I came to disregard a good bit of Tomlin criticism as conceived in bad faith. But Tomlin is an NFL coach, and he’s never pretended that he’s not a fair target in other ways. He hasn’t won a playoff game in six years, an uncomfortable drought for a team with six Super Bowls. He’s made some genuinely perplexing staffing decisions, the most infamous of which continues to haunt the Steelers in the current moment. Calls for Tomlin to fire offensive coordinator Matt Canada, who has never produced a 400-yard game in three years on the job, have become ubiquitous enough that FIRE CANADA signs appear at wholly unrelated sporting events. It defies belief that the Steelers wouldn’t move the ball better, and thus not need to overcome yardage deficits to win every game, if they hired one of the many capable offensive coaches who can, every once in a while, scheme up an offensive outburst.

The Steelers take a collaborative approach to roster-building, and Tomlin’s fingerprints are all over the roster that’s been bad enough to necessitate his superb coaching. Second-year Pitt alum Kenny Pickett is one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL, and Tomlin had a hand in the Steelers handing him the keys. Naturally, Tomlin should get some credit for keeping the Steelers in games so that Pickett can oddly become a superstar in the fourth quarter of close ones. The Steelers are not good, on a down-to-down basis, and Tomlin owns that. But he also owns their tendency to stay within striking distance and then deliver a blow.

Still, this team that Tomlin has helped put together really should be bad. The Steelers are 26^th in yards per play on offense and 27^th on defense. Their saving grace is a plus-10 turnover margin that ties them for best in the league. Most of their wins have swung completely on takeaways and placekicking, where the Steelers have another advantage in the automatic Chris Boswell. Tomlin and the front office built a team that should be pretty good at getting turnovers. (The highest-paid player is outside linebacker T.J. Watt, one of the best sack-getters in league history.) But it still stands that with one of the league’s worst offenses and one of its worst defenses, the Steelers have been outlandishly lucky to win six of their first nine.

And yet those wins count. It is close to impossible that the Steelers will lose the yardage war in all 17 games and finish 11–6 or 12–5. At some point, they’ll need to play well to keep doing well. They may not have that in them. But the essence of Tomlin is that the Steelers are a virtual lock to be relevant in the NFL’s playoff picture until the last week of the regular season or later. The Steelers have played exactly one game in Tomlin’s 16-and-a-half years while being eliminated from playoff contention, and that was in 2012. A reasonable question to ask about the 2023 Steelers is how this apparently inexplicable success has happened. But as it regards Tomlin, a much better question is why it wouldn’t.