Before Mike McCarthy speaks for the first time as Pittsburgh Steelers coach on Tuesday afternoon, we really need to go over some of the things team president Art Rooney II said about him over the weekend.
Instead of just a quick comment in a press release, Steelers.com posted a full story about McCarthy’s agreement to coach the Steelers. It was filled with numerous quotes from Rooney.
As expected — coming from the in-house website — it painted a very positive picture of who McCarthy is, how the process went down and why fans who are dubious of the move should have confidence in how it will play out.
One thing became abundantly clear from Rooney’s interview with Bob Labriola. If Aaron Rodgers doesn’t return for a second season in black and gold, Will Howard has an excellent chance to be the Steelers’ starting quarterback.
“He likes Will Howard, thinks Will has tremendous upside and is looking forward to working with him,” Rooney said of McCarthy. “Obviously, (he) feels like Mason can be a contributor. We’ll have to sit down and discuss where Aaron is, if he decides to come back, and whether that all makes sense. I think Mike was very comfortable with the quarterback room and the possibilities with the quarterback room. In particular, the fact that we have a young quarterback on the roster in whom he sees some upside.”
How McCarthy feels that way with such limited knowledge of Howard at this level is unknown to me. But there is certainly a large segment of the Steelers fan base that has talked itself into thinking that Howard is a diamond in the rough as a sixth-round pick, just like Tom Brady, and McCarthy’s extensive history of working with quarterbacks will bring it out of him.
Those are delusions of grandeur, but McCarthy might at least help Howard become decent. I’m willing to see how that looks with an open mind this year if they can’t trade for, draft or sign anyone better.
Just don’t bring back Rodgers. If people really are concerned about McCarthy being nothing more than a different version of Mike Tomlin, the quickest way to manifest that belief into reality would be to bring back a 42-year-old quarterback who doesn’t appear to have enough left in the tank to elevate this club above its current level of perpetual mediocrity.
Rooney tried to get out in front of the Rodgers topic.
”We don’t know what Aaron’s plans are right now, and that did not weigh heavily in the decision. We’ll see where Aaron is, and we’ve left the door open, but obviously we all have to sit down and see if that makes sense,” Rooney insisted. “So that’ll happen sometime in the next month or so. But the decision was made based on Mike being the coach we want, and it really had very little to do with whether Aaron is going to be back or not.”
I’ll believe Rodgers is out of the mix when I actually see him announce his retirement with my own eyes — presumably on “The Pat McAfee Show.” Not a moment before.
Or when I see him in a different uniform in 2026.
And when Rooney says “the next month or so,” he better mean it. No more sitting around waiting for Rodgers to decide what he’s going to do until June. Get a decision from him before free agency hits in March and move on.
Otherwise, commit to bringing him back and live with the consequences — which you certainly did for 10 of the last 12 quarters of football he played in 2025.
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Rooney explained why the team settled on McCarthy before interviewing any potential candidates in person from the four teams who were still in contention on conference championship weekend.
”We wound up bringing in three guys for in-person interviews — Brian Flores, Mike McCarthy and Anthony Weaver — and then we sat down and talked about whether we had our man or if we wanted to bring in more people for in-person interviews,” said Rooney. “We decided that Mike was the man for the job, and so we went ahead and offered him the job on Saturday.”
Nineteen years ago, this franchise allowed Tomlin every possible chance to emerge from the fringes of the interview process to the top of the applicant stack by virtue of his impressive interviews. It baffles me that Rooney and general manager Omar Khan weren’t willing to at least give Los Angeles’ Chris Shula and/or Nathan Scheelhaase a chance to meet with the organization in person.
McCarthy wasn’t going to get hired anywhere else in the meantime. As I’ve said repeatedly, my issue with hiring McCarthy is far more about the process than the person.
Credit to Labriola for acknowledging in the post that the reaction to McCarthy’s appointment was “largely negative.” Here’s how Rooney responded:
“We’re really not worried about winning the initial press conference. It’s about picking the coach we believe will help us win games. … Social media really doesn’t enter into it. And none of that will matter once we’re starting to play games.”
Oh, please!
Rooney isn’t worried about the “initial press conference.” McCarthy will be fine in that setting. He’ll wear a black and gold suit and tie, tell a few stories about Greenfield, wax nostalgic about his “Pittsburgh ruutz, n’at,” and the local TV stations will run those quotes as cold opens for a week.
I’d worry more about winning in the playoffs than the introductory press conference. McCarthy did that just one time in his last seven years as a head coach.
Plus, something tells me you were worried about the social media reaction. Otherwise, I’m not so sure you would have done such a lengthy sit-down to spin all of these topics 24 hours after the hire had been torn apart online, and after your own team’s social media account was retweeting Bill Cowher’s hearty endorsement of McCarthy on CBS.
Finally …
”We decided to bring Mike on because we believe that he’s the right coach for us at this point to help lead us to a championship,” Rooney said.
Did you? Or did you simply pick the guy who was the most likely to prevent you from dipping below .500 in 2026?