Mike McCarthy is coming home to coach the football team he grew up rooting for.

The Pittsburgh Steelers announced Saturday that they’d “verbally agreed” to hire McCarthy as their head coach. A native of Pittsburgh’s Greenfield neighborhood, McCarthy, 62, was the most experienced of the candidates to interview with the Steelers, having spent 18 seasons as an NFL coach with the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys.

In hiring McCarthy, the Steelers added an offensive-minded head coach whose Cowboys teams led the league in scoring in 2021 and ’23. He ranks 15th on the league’s all-time wins list and won a Super Bowl with the Packers to cap the 2010 season.

His career record is 174-112-2.

McCarthy was one of three candidates the Steelers interviewed in-person this week, joining Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores and former Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Anthony Weaver. McCarthy replaces Mike Tomlin, who resigned after 19 seasons as the team’s coach.

The Steelers broke a decades-old tradition by hiring McCarthy. Their past three head coaches were all former defensive coordinators in their 30s, dating back to Chuck Noll in 1969.

Once an assistant at Pitt, McCarthy rose through the NFL coaching ranks, first as a quarterbacks coach for Marty Schottenheimer in Kansas City, and later as offensive coordinator for New Orleans and San Francisco.

In Green Bay, McCarthy’s teams won 125 games and qualified for the playoffs nine times in 13 seasons between 2006-18. His greatest achievement as an NFL coach came at the expense of his hometown Steelers, when the Packers and quarterback Aaron Rodgers won Super Bowl XLV in February 2011.

McCarthy oversaw two of Rodgers’ four MVP seasons and could potentially reunite with the veteran quarterback in Pittsburgh.

McCarthy coached the Packers for eight more seasons after the Super Bowl win but was fired in 2018 when the Packers fell to 4-7-1 and ultimately missed the playoffs for the second year in a row.

Hired by Dallas in 2020, McCarthy went 49-35 in five seasons. He posted three consecutive 12-5 seasons in 2021-23 but couldn’t convert regular-season wins into postseason success. The Cowboys went 1-3 in the playoffs under McCarthy.

Still, his offenses often ranked among the league’s best. In 2021, the Cowboys led the league in points and yards behind quarterback Dak Prescott and were again the highest-scoring team in 2023.

But in 2024, McCarthy’s final season in Dallas, the team went 7-10 and missed the postseason as a hamstring injury limited Prescott to eight games. With McCarthy’s contract expiring, he and the team parted ways after the season.

His overall playoff record is 11-11.

This story will be updated.