To be perfectly honest, very few except for the most die-hard of Pittsburgh Steelers fans expected anything other than the result we got last night. The Baltimore Ravens abused the Steelers in the Wild Card Round in a 28 - 14 victory that wasn’t nearly as competitive as the score would indicate. The Ravens grinded the once-formidable Steel Curtain into powder and little flakey bits.
Rushing for 299 yards in a playoff game against a Steelers defense says a lot, but the Ravens 13-play, 85-yard touchdown drive to put themselves up 14 - 0 on the Steelers in the second quarter – in which the Ravens ran the ball every single play – really says it all. The Steelers had no answers for the Ravens’ run game, and the Steelers didn’t have the punch on offense to make up for it.
So now, the Steelers’ season is over, with five consecutive losses to finish the year and their fourth early playoff exit in their last four tries. This isn’t how seasons are supposed to end in Pittsburgh – not for a franchise who’s 36 playoff wins ranks in the top-five all-time and who’s six Super Bowl victories is tied for most ever. It’s been 2,919 days since the Steelers last won a playoff game. Back then, the COVID-19 pandemic was still almost three years away. It’s been so long, the last time the Steelers won a playoff game, Donald Trump hadn’t even been inaugurated for his first term yet!
Understandably, Steelers’ fans are – to put it mildly – miffed. They want answers. They want changes. They want better results. As a result, there’s a growing crescendo to part ways with Mike Tomlin, who’s been head coach of the Steelers for the last eighteen years. Despite the loss last night, Mike Tomlin, head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, still owns an impressive career record (76 - 37 - 1) against the AFC North. That’s a career winning percentage against his own division of .666 repeating – an appropriate number considering Tomlin has been the bane of the AFC North’s existence.
Especially for the Bengals and Browns (but also occasionally the Ravens too), Tomlin has been the devil-incarnate as a football coach. His teams are going to be rugged, and they’re going to be mean. And they are definitely – most definitely – not going below .500. Tomlin’s eighteen-year track record of no-losing-seasons is evidence enough for that.
But the NFL is a results-based business, and unfortunately for Tomlin, not having a playoff-win since before the Nintendo Switch was released looks pretty bad on the surface. Expectations in Steelers’ land are much higher than one-and-done in the playoffs. Everything was (supposedly) set up for Tomlin to succeed too. The Steelers were spending a pittance at quarterback, and were leaning into Tomlin’s strengths by spending an NFL-high 70% of their cap space on defense. It still didn’t work.
That’s why, even though potentially three-quarters of the league would be interested in Tomlin’s services if he were available, Tomlin and the Steelers might be headed for a divorce. And that would be a major win for the AFC North.
Recent playoff woes aside, Tomlin has dominated this division. He’s won two-thirds of his games against division opponents. His defenses have finished number one in the NFL in points allowed three times, number one in yards allowed four times, and number one in takeaways twice. He’s the youngest coach to win a Super Bowl in NFL history, and he did it in just his second season as Steelers head coach.
When it comes to all-time Steelers coaches, if you asked a Steelers fan right now, they’d probably tell you Tomlin ranks comfortably third, but that might not be the case. Of course, nobody can touch Chuck Noll and his four Super Bowls, but the contest between Tomlin and Cowher is much closer than most probably realize.
For one thing, Tomlin has coached the Steelers longer than Cowher, his eighteen (and potentially counting) seasons clears Cowher’s fifteen. Tomlin also has more career wins than Cowher (183 to 149) and his career winning-percentage against his division (.667 to .663) and the rest of the NFL (.630 to .623) outpaces Cowher as well. The one place he falls short is in playoff wins (8 to 11), but Tomlin and Cowher both won a Super Bowl apiece. The margin between them is razor-thin, if it exists at all.
If the Steelers are insistent on moving on from Tomlin after another anonymous playoff appearance, it might not work out in their favor. Pittsburgh has famously only had three NFL head coaches since 1969. Cowher succeeded Noll in 1992, and Tomlin succeeded Cowher in 2007, but whoever follows Tomlin now won’t feel like a successor – he’ll feel like a replacement, and that’s not the only concern.
During both Cowher’s and Tomlin’s Super Bowl runs, they enjoyed the services of Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback. Without top-tier quarterback-play, both coaches look more “above-average” than “Hall-of-Fame,” and the numbers bear it out: both saw their winning percentages jump more than 80-percentage points with Big Ben than without him, and neither won a Super Bowl without Roethlisberger under center either.
If you’re making the case that Tomlin is inferior to Cowher, it’s solely on the basis that Cowher was better with Roethlisberger than Tomlin was, and that is undeniable. Cowher’s career .722 winning-percentage towers over Tomlin’s .628, but it’s a much smaller sample-size (3 years to 15). Then again, the fact that the Steelers only won a single Super Bowl during the Tomlin/Roethlisberger years might be an indictment against Tomlin; how could a supposedly great coach like Tomlin only win one Super Bowl with a Hall of Fame quarterback and routinely excellent defenses?
I’ll tell you how: Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. Nobody in the AFC could compete with the consistency of Brady in his prime, Tomlin’s Steelers included. Cowher managed to grab his Super Bowl and get out before the Patriots could humble him too much – Tomlin wasn’t so lucky. With Big Ben now out of the picture, Tomlin can’t rely on Hall-of-Fame quarterback play to help even the odds. These days, Tomlin’s Steelers are just another team in a crowded AFC.
So, whether you believe Tomlin or Cowher is greater is really irrelevant: the Steelers can’t win right now because they can’t get it right at quarterback. Even toward the end of his career, Roethlisberger was putting up some huge numbers, but he wasn’t exactly playing outstanding football, routinely ranking amongst the league-leaders in turnovers and sacks taken, all while missing his fair share of games due to injuries and suspensions. In other words, for as great as he was, Big Ben was far from a perfect player.
It’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Steelers too. They are too well-coached and talented to finish with a bad enough record to grab one of the top quarterbacks in any given draft, and they don’t have good enough quarterback-play to advance in the playoffs. Short of getting lucky and reaching for a passer in the mid-to-late first round (or trading up, which doesn’t fit the Steelers’ style at all), the avenues for significant improvement at quarterback seem incredibly limited.
That’s not Tomlin’s fault, but he could pay the price anyway. That would be a win for the rest of the AFC North. The Steelers might not be content to settle for one-and-dones in the playoffs, but at least they’re getting there. Just ask the New York Jets how they feel: they haven’t sniffed the playoffs since 2010! Removing Mike Tomlin might bring some momentary satisfaction, but a new coach, especially in these uncertain times in Pittsburgh, is far from a recipe for success. After all, when Tomlin succeeded Cowher, he inherited Roethlisberger. What is this hypothetical new coach getting?