Pittsburgh Steelers Extend Head Coach Mike Tomlin: Is This NFL Purgatory?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The NFL, especially the AFC, has become a league where beating Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs is the top priority if you want to win a Super Bowl. Yet, the Pittsburgh Steelers seem to think keeping head coach Mike Tomlin in town is their best shot of doing this.
Earlier this week, the Steelers announced a 3-year contract extension for Tomlin that will keep him in Pittsburgh through the 2027 season. With Bill Belichick out of the league, Tomlin is the longest-tenured coach in the NFL as the 2024 season will be his 18th season as coach of the Steelers.
Tomlin has never had a losing season, and Pittsburgh can tie the NFL record held by the 1965-85 Cowboys with a 21st non-losing season in a row this year.
Extending such a head coach sounds like a no-brainer decision until you remember the Steelers have not won a playoff game since they snuck out of Kansas City in January 2017 with an 18-16 win by kicking six field goals. In fact, that game was the impetus for Kansas City drafting Mahomes in 2017.
The seven seasons without a playoff win is the longest drought in Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl era. Pittsburgh loves to boast the stability of having only three head coaches since 1969, but at what point did this franchise become one that competes to have non-losing seasons instead of one that plays for AFC Championship Games and Super Bowls?
What ever happened to the goal of becoming the first franchise to win seven Super Bowls?
Hall of Fame coach Chuck Noll took the Steelers to the AFC Championship Game seven times in his career. Hall of Fame coach Bill Cowher reached it six times in 15 seasons (1992-2005). Tomlin has only been there three times in 17 years, and he lost big the last time in New England in the 2016 season.
The fact we are giving the Steelers this much of a spotlight in the offseason might make some scoff, which just goes to show how the mighty have fallen. But this has been a flagship franchise in the modern NFL ever since Franco Harris pulled off The Immaculate Reception.
Since the 1970 merger, the Steelers lead all NFL franchises in wins (550) and are the only team to win over 60% of their games (60.9%) when you include the postseason. No franchise has won more than six Super Bowls.
But keeping Tomlin as the coach for potentially four more seasons through 2027 feels like a franchise admitting that the new standard is barely finishing with a winning record and crashing in the postseason.
This is what NFL purgatory looks like, and we are going to show why things are unlikely to change in Pittsburgh until the team finds its next head coach
Myth: Mike Tomlin Is Pittsburgh’s Best Chance to Win Another Super Bowl
If the goal is still winning the Super Bowl or at least getting there, then it is hard to say Tomlin gives Pittsburgh a real edge to achieve that in 2024 and beyond.
The dirty little secret of the NFL is that Super Bowls are won in small windows of time, and Tomlin hasn’t been to one since the 2010 season. He hasn’t won one since 2008, and even that was largely with Cowher’s team.
This is not a college where a great coach like Nick Saban (Alabama football) or Mike Krzyzewski (Duke basketball) can repeatedly get new recruiting classes of top-end talent and go through multiple windows of championship success for decades.
No NFL coach has ever won a Super Bowl with two different franchises. Since the Super Bowl era started in 1966, no coach has ever won a Super Bowl if he had to wait more than eight seasons to even get to a single Super Bowl with his team. While it took Cowher 14 seasons to win one for Pittsburgh, he did at least get to one in his fourth season in 1995.
There are 26 head coaches who have been to multiple Super Bowls, a list which includes Tomlin. But of the 14 coaches to win multiple Super Bowls, all of their titles except for one came with gaps of 1-to-6 seasons. For instance, Tom Landry won titles with the Cowboys in 1971 and 1977, which was a 6-season gap.
The only Super Bowl win with a longer gap than that was when Bill Belichick won after a 10-year drought in 2014 with the Patriots, who had last won it in 2004. But that also includes a perfect season in 2007 that was spoiled in the Super Bowl and another Super Bowl loss to the Giants in 2011. After that long gap, Belichick won every other title in 2014, 2016, and 2018.
Tomlin was fortunate to win a Super Bowl in his second season. He joins Mike Holmgren and Pete Carroll as the only coaches to win their first Super Bowl, get to another, and never win a second title.
In Holmgren’s case, he went back-to-back with a great Green Bay team in 1996-97, losing the second trip to Denver. Then he went to coach the Seahawks in 1999 before he led that team to a Super Bowl loss to Cowher’s Steelers in 2005. But keep that in mind, the Packers let go of a coach who reached back-to-back Super Bowls just two years earlier.
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