Philly Front Office

The Pittsburgh Steelers have been a secret jealousy of mine for a while, along with the St. Louis Cardinals and San Antonio Spurs. These are teams that are always competitive, win championships but don’t feel like failures if they lose, and are almost always well run. They are regular purveyors of blissful, no worries fanhood.¹ That’s what makes what Pittsburgh just did so puzzling.

Worst Front Office Series: WTF Cleveland Browns???

The Steelers have been around since 1933, same as my Eagles. In that time, they have had 16 coaches, but famously only 3 in the last 56 years. When I started writing this,² Mike Tomlin, the Steelers head coach for the last 19 years, had just stepped down. The job was open for the first time since 2007, with only 1992 and 1969 in recent history before that. The job is almost papal in its tenure and exclusivity. When Tomlin resigned, black smoke spewed from the roof of Heinz Field (I’m not calling it Acrisure Stadium). The Steelers conclave met for 11 days before it was time for the yellow smoke. Mike McCarthy was to be the newest coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Mike McCarthy???

Lineage

Chuck Noll coached the Steelers from 1969 to 1991.³ He was 37 when he got the job and had spent the previous 7 years as a defensive coordinator in San Diego and Baltimore. He won 4 Super Bowls in his 22 years calling the shots. He retired just a few days before his 59th birthday and was quickly elected to the Hall of Fame. The Steelers were his only head coaching gig in his career.

Noll was succeeded by Bill Cowher.⁴ Cowher, a Pittsburgh native who had been the DC in Kansas City previously, was 34 years old. Over his 15 years in Pittsburgh, the Steelers would go to 2 Super Bowls and win 1. Despite being offered several opportunities to coach again and only being 49, once he stepped down from the Steelers in 2007, Cowher never coached again. Like Noll, Pittsburgh was his only job as a head coach in his Hall of Fame career.

That brings us to Mike Tomlin. Tomlin had been a defensive backs coach for 8 seasons including winning a Super Bowl in that position with Tampa. He then spent a year as DC in Minnesota before getting the Steelers HC job at 34. Do we see a pattern here? Like Cowher, Tomlin would go to 2 Super Bowls and win 1 in Pittsburgh. After 19 seasons, he stepped down having NEVER finished below .500.⁵ He will presumably be inducted into the Hall like his predecessors, but whether he accepts another head coaching job remains to be seen.

Mike McCarthy

To say the Steelers are doing things a little different by hiring Mike McCarthy is an understatement. There is literally nothing in common with the previous 3 hires. McCarthy is in his early 60s not his mid 30s, he’s a former head coach and offensive coordinator rather than a new defensive minded coach, and he’s been fired twice previously rather than on an upward trajectory. McCarthy is simply not the kind of long view investment in the future that the Steelers are known for. Instead, he is a win-now retread the Steelers are hoping will bring them back to glory immediately without a rebuild.

In all fairness, Mike McCarthy is a Super Bowl champion. He and Aaron Rodgers led them to the title in 2010 and over his tenure he had a .618 winning percentage. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Despite having Rodgers and regularly winning the NFC North, the Packers stopped making much noise in the playoffs. Eventually the team fell off, and he was fired with a few games to go in 2018. That’s not good.

The Cowboys tried to rekindle the early McCarthy offensive magic by hiring him in 2020. Despite a trio of 12-5 seasons, the Cowboys were only 1-3 in the playoffs with losses marred by poor late game decision making. As an Eagles fan, we were sad when Jerry Jones made the decision to let him go after last season.

Steelers, is That You?

After decades of being a well-run franchise, the Steelers have been blundering as of late, especially in the QB department. When Ben Roethlisberger retired after the 2021 season, they made the prudent move to draft a new QB to build around. Unfortunately, they picked Kenny Pickett (the best QB prospect but in a VERY poor QB draft). That obviously didn’t work out. Instead of going back to the draft well, they’ve had Mitch Trubisky (7 starts), Mason Rudolph (4), Russell Wilson (11), Justin Fields (6), and Aaron Rodgers make starts since then. Did they honestly think any of them would lead them back to a Super Bowl?

Mike Tomlin leaving should have been the opportunity for the Steelers to perform major surgery again. Make some trades, draft a QB, and rebuild around a young head coach. It’s the perfect time for the franchise to get its hands dirty again and invest in the long future. Except, that’s not what they are doing at all. You don’t bring in a 62-year-old coach with a pedigree to start over; you bring him in because you think you are good enough to make another run with what you have. He’s a band-aid or opting for therapy instead of the needed operation.

So, what happens now? Is McCarthy there to coach 42-year-old Aaron Rodgers next season? Considering the connection, it sure seems like it. They can’t think Rodgers is going to do this forever, right? Ok, if not Rodgers, then who? The first and maybe only name on the list is…sorry Steelers fans… Kirk Cousins (I’m hoping it’s Tanner McKee, but that hype has died down a bit). I just don’t see an endgame here.

Aaron Rodgers, Darkest Timeline

By hiring McCarthy, the Steelers have done the VERY un-Steelers maneuver of playing for right now instead of planning ahead. The end of the Tomlin era was marred by mediocrity, but isn’t that exactly what they are now locking themselves into? McCarthy and the veteran QB du jour they will continue with is not going to get them over the hump. We aren’t going to have to wait 15+ years for the next Steelers coach. It is going to be 3 years before the Steelers are finally old and bad enough to rebuild and McCarthy will be gone.

All statistics and years courtesy of Pro Football Reference

1. My Spurs fan friend Armando has described his fandom like being a trust fun kid, he knows Daddy will take care of everything ↩︎
2. My cousin is a die hard Steelers fan and we talked on the phone this weekend. The second we hung up I got the alert about McCarthy. His response was the Michael Scott “No! God please! No! No!” gif. ↩︎
3. Did you know, Tony Dungy was DC in Pittsburgh under Noll for 5 years? ↩︎
4. Cowher beat out fellow mustachioed DC Dave Wannstedt for the job. The stache had to play some kind of factor in the hiring even if just subconsciously. How could it not? ↩︎
5. People use this against him for some reason. ↩︎