The Steelers should have fired Mike Tomlin long before he fired himself, just as the Penguins should have moved on from Mike Sullivan a few years before they did.
If championships are the goal, it really is OK to fire a successful coach who can’t get to the finish line, or in some cases, the starting line anymore. You simply have to trust yourself to hire the right replacement.
It’s still hard to believe that Steelers president Art Rooney II was ready to “run it back” with Tomlin after nine straight years without coming close to a single playoff win. Nine years is an eternity in pro football. Nine years encompassed the entire Steelers dynasty of the 1970s.
Even Tomlin thought the playoff failures were justification for firing Tomlin.
So, he fired himself.
“I thought it was a good time for the organization, to be quite honest with you,” Tomlin told his new employer, NBC. “We didn’t have a lot of success in the playoffs in recent years.”
That should have been Rooney’s quote!
Anyway, look around the sports world. Organizations are proving that patience isn’t necessarily a virtue and that it can be quite beneficial to move from a good coach to a better one — or at least to the right one at the right time:
• The New York Knicks are headed back to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. Remember all the angst over the firing of Tom Thibodeau last spring?
Thibodeau had gotten the Knicks to within two wins of their first NBA Finals in a quarter century. They’d won 50 games in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 1994-95 and vanquished the hated Celtics.
You don’t fire that guy! Unless you do. And you bring in Mike Brown, who now has the Knicks actually in the NBA Finals and looking like a strong candidate to win.
• The Vegas Golden Knights shocked the hockey world by firing Bruce Cassidy and hiring John Tortorella with eight games left in the regular season and the team in playoff position.
Cassidy had a record of 178-99-43 with two division titles and a Stanley Cup. People were outraged. How can this be?
Well, look now. Good ole Torts has the Knights within a game of the Cup Final, stunningly up three games to none on the Colorado Avalanche.
The list goes on. The Seattle Seahawks fired Pete Carroll before the 2024 season and just won a Super Bowl with Mike Macdonald.
The Philadelphia Eagles moved on from Andy Reid after 14 mostly good seasons and won a Super Bowl with Doug Pederson, then quickly jettisoned Pederson and won another under Nick Sirianni.
The Penguins — who once fired Michel Therrien and won a Cup in the same year — finally said goodbye to Sullivan and immediately returned to the playoffs under Dan Muse while Sully’s New York Rangers sunk to the bottom of the league.
Coaching changes don’t always work, of course. You don’t want to become the Cleveland Browns and switch ’em like underwear. But you don’t want to go decades between playoff wins or championship runs, either.
You don’t want to live in your fears, to borrow a phrase.