Mike Tomlin has a history of guiding the Pittsburgh Steelers to 18 consecutive seasons without a losing record and a dozen NFL playoff appearances, yet the Super Bowl XLIII champion coach knows his story comes with baggage that he refuses to project onto his players.
That doesn’t mean he’s immune to friendly fire.
Tomlin’s career is on a Hall of Fame trajectory, yet he takes a five-game postseason losing streak into Saturday’s AFC wild-card game against the Baltimore Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium. The Steelers haven’t won a playoff game since an 18-16 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Divisional round Jan. 15, 2017, an eight-year stretch that serves as their longest drought of the Super Bowl era.
“They haven’t been relevant in quite a while,” Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who led the Steelers to four Super Bowl championships in the 1970s, told TribLive this week. “They are living off past glory.”
A “Fox NFL Sunday” co-host and studio analyst for three decades, Bradshaw has been a frequent critic of the franchise and the Rooney family’s ownership. And he’s hardly alone. Even as the Steelers have finished four seasons with double-digit victories since 2016, including a 10-7 record this season, it’s become an annual ritual for Steelers fans to treat the lack of recent postseason success as a referendum on whether Tomlin’s tenure has reached its expiration date.
“You have to ask questions about Mike Tomlin,” Bradshaw said. “Doesn’t mean you’ve got to get (rid of) him, but sometimes you can empower a coach so much that they don’t feel threatened. … I don’t see the Rooneys doing anything. That’s not their style. I think Tomlin knows he can stay there as long as he wants to, but sometimes you’ve got to shake that tree a little bit and scare people and say, ‘Look, you’ve got one more year. If we don’t get in and win a playoff game, we’re going to have to make some changes. It’s not personal. It’s business.’”
For Tomlin, business is personal. Asked earlier this season how he avoids burnout, Tomlin called it a question that was easy for him to answer: “I love what I do. It’s my job and my hobby. Burnout is not a component of the equation for me. I love my job. I’m excited each and every week about the challenges that this role provides me and us.”
How the Steelers respond to those challenges can change perspectives in an instant. When the Steelers beat the Ravens, 18-16, on Nov. 17 at Acrisure Stadium, it marked their eighth win in nine games against their AFC North arch-rivals. Soon after, the franchise’s other legendary quarterback credited Tomlin for “cooking in (Ravens coach John) Harbaugh’s kitchen,” likening it to the dominance exhibited by former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.
“I think that Tomlin’s outcoaching him,” Ben Roethlisberger said on his “Footbahlin” podcast. “The way that Coach Belichick used to outcoach certain teams, it feels like that’s what we’re doing to them.”
That was before the four-game skid to end the season. Double-digit losses at the Philadelphia Eagles, Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs in an 11-day span that saw Tomlin go from NFL Coach of the Year front-runner to standing before the firing squad again, refusing to blink.
The secret to Tomlin’s success is in the collective. Or, as Tomlin puts it in a favored euphemism, that the strength of the pack is the pack. The Steelers still talk like a team that believes it can beat the Ravens and make a run to Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, if it eliminates the multitude of mistakes that have plagued the past month.
“We don’t worry about anything on the outside,” Steelers cornerback Donte Jackson said. “Everybody in this building wants what’s best for us. Everybody else is just riding the wave of emotions. We can’t be that in this building. We haven’t been that all year, and we trust what we have and we trust in what we can do. We’re focusing on that, for real.”
Second-year cornerback Joey Porter Jr. got an up-close glimpse of the glory days as a child, as his father was a four-time Pro Bowl outside linebacker for the Steelers from 1999-2006 and a starter on their Super Bowl XL champions under Bill Cowher before returning to serve as an assistant coach on Tomlin’s staff from 2014-18.
“Just being around the locker room and seeing those guys, you can kind of tell what a Super Bowl team looks like, what a team looks like when they’re about to go on a deep playoff run,” Porter Jr. said. “I see a lot of similarities in that case, just brotherhood and the camaraderie that we all have and understanding that we all have one goal together. Just that aspect, I see in both teams. Now that I’m playing on a team that I used to watch my dad being part of and coach go to a playoff run, it’s a good sight.”
It’s a sight whose roster complexion could change dramatically with another one-and-done. Quarterbacks Russell Wilson and Justin Fields, whom the Steelers are paying a combined $4.4 million this season, will both become free agents and could command dramatic pay raises.
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The Steelers declined the fifth-year option on running back Najee Harris, a former first-round pick who has rushed for 1,000 yards in each of his first four seasons. And they will have to make a major decision on whether to extend mercurial wide receiver George Pickens, who drew a rare rebuke when Tomlin said he needs to “grow up in a hurry.”
“I just always think about the moment, and I’m not really worried about anything down the road or anything like that,” said the 36-year-old Wilson, who won a Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks. “We’re not just looking for one playoff win, but the only one you can get is this one right now. And so, I think the focus for us is just getting ready to go, enjoying the process of this. Playing in the playoffs is such a special thing. And like I said, for some of the guys who haven’t played in the playoffs, this is a special moment for all of us.”
Perhaps as much for T.J. Watt as anyone. The All-Pro outside linebacker lamented that he has yet to win a playoff game in his eight-year NFL career and how a Super Bowl championship separates the legacies of Steelers greats when they return for reunions in Pittsburgh.
“I say all the time that there’s a big difference between guys that come back that are Super Bowl champions and guys that aren’t,” Watt said. “That’s not a slight at the guys who aren’t — I’m one of those guys right now — but there’s definitely an aura and a sense to a guy that has won a Super Bowl.”
The Steelers’ success under Tomlin might be appreciated even more by their newcomers. Wide receiver Mike Williams, acquired from the New York Jets at the trade deadline, made only two playoff appearances in seven seasons with the Los Angeles Chargers. His resume, however, does include a 23-17 wild-card win at Baltimore in January 2019.
“Not too many teams have this opportunity to have consecutive winning seasons like we do here,” Williams said. “I feel like the fans kind of spoil you. Everybody wants to win the Super Bowl. That’s the main goal. It’s our goal, too. We’ve just got to take it one game at a time, though.”
Steelers outside linebacker Preston Smith, also acquired at the trade deadline, has reached the postseason with his third team after previously qualifying with Washington and Green Bay, the latter of which twice played for the NFC championship (in 2019 and ’20) but never reached the Super Bowl during his time there.
“In the postseason, you’re chasing perfection,” Smith said. “I’ve only been here two months but from the two months I’ve been here, I’ve seen that, of course, this organization has a lot of storied wins and victories. If you want to be a part of history, you’ve got to do some big things.”
And if you want to remain relevant, you’ve got to find new glory.
Staff writer Joe Rutter contributed.