The Mike Tomlin time loop of mediocrity is nearly complete. Entering Week 18, the Steelers are 9-7 and in first place in the AFC North. With a win over the Ravens on Sunday Night Football, Pittsburgh would clinch the division title and its fifth playoff berth in the past six seasons. Yet the team is not only a home underdog against Baltimore, but is also coming off its worst performance of the year: a 13-6 loss to the Browns, who entered the game with a record of 3-12. The Steelers would have secured a postseason spot simply by taking care of business against an opponent that’s been suspected of tanking; instead, they faceplanted, putting forth the most embarrassing offensive showing imaginable. Now, if they lose Sunday they’ll be eliminated, despite their playoff odds sitting at 91 percent heading into Christmas.
Being just good enough to fail has been a pattern for much of Tomlin’s Pittsburgh career. The 53-year-old is the longest-tenured head coach in the NFL, having held his position since 2007. He is 192-114-2, a .627 winning percentage, good for 25th in history among qualified coaches. His Steelers have won the AFC North seven times, and they won Super Bowl XLIII after the 2008 season. Yet in recent years they’ve become stagnant: Pittsburgh has won exactly nine or 10 games in each of the past four seasons and hasn’t won a playoff game since January 2017. No matter what happens in Week 18, the Steelers will have exactly nine or 10 wins again in 2025.
Fans are fed up with a stale product. During a 26-7 loss to the Bills on November 30, the crowd chanted “Fire Tomlin” and booed throughout Pittsburgh’s traditional fourth-quarter playing of “Renegade.” On Sunday, anti-Tomlin messaging spread across social media, and a prominent local radio host said, “If they lose to Baltimore at home, he should be fired before he gets off the field at Acrisure [Stadium].”
Tomlin’s effectiveness has been the subject of debate for a few years. Nationally, he is seen as one of the best coaches in the business, the kind of no-nonsense leader other teams would be desperate to have at the helm. Locally, he’s seen as a disappointment, someone who crashes into the same roadblocks season after season. And as cries for his ouster have grown louder, so too have arguments about how the Steelers should handle one of the most complex, fascinating, and important decisions in the league.
After this season, Tomlin will have two years remaining on his contract, 2026 and a team option in 2027. On December 6, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the Steelers must decide to pick up Tomlin’s option by March 1. If they decline, Schefter said, “they would allow their head coach to enter the final year of his contract next season, which teams typically prefer not to do.”
So, let’s break it down. What does Tomlin have working in his favor? What could convince the Rooney family to fire him, depending on what happens against the Ravens and possibly in the playoffs? And if Pittsburgh elects to move on, what would that reveal about the state of the franchise? As the Steelers stare at the game that could determine their future, here are the complete cases for and against Tomlin.
The Case for Tomlin: He’s Never Had a Losing Season
Let’s start with the obvious. Of all the Tomlin talking points, this is the talking point, the one that’s repeated ad nauseam on talk shows and in columns like this. After Week 18, Tomlin will have coached 19 full seasons for the Steelers. He’ll have finished above .500 16 times and gone 8-8 three times (2012, 2013, and 2019). He wins more games than he loses. The standard is the standard.
It is hard to overstate how impressive this is. Not only does Tomlin hold the record for the most consecutive non-losing seasons to begin an NFL head coaching career, but he also holds that record by five full seasons. According to data compiled by the Elias Sports Bureau, Marty Schottenheimer is in second place with 14 straight .500-or-better seasons to start his career, and Don Shula is in third place with 13. Tomlin is to this statistic what Joe DiMaggio is to hitting streaks: He’s in a class of his own.
Consecutive Winning Seasons to Start a Head Coaching Career
Credit: Elias Sports Bureau
Tomlin has done this despite the odds being stacked against him on several occasions. In 2009, the Steelers were 6-7 in mid-December before ripping off wins in their final three games against the Packers, Ravens, and Dolphins. In 2013, they opened 0-4 and were 5-8 before rallying to get to .500. In 2022, they started 2-6 before going 7-2 after their bye. “Tomlin’s strength has been his ability to keep his house upright with bubble gum and duct tape despite an ongoing earthquake under his feet,” USA Today wrote after that resurgent ’22 performance.
He has the highest floor of any coach in the league. The issue is his ceiling.
The Case Against Tomlin: His Teams Collapse Down the Stretch
Tomlin may have never had a losing record, but his teams have consistently lost when it matters most. See if you can spot the trend over the past eight years:
- In 2018, the Steelers started 7-2-1. They lost four of their final six regular-season games and missed the playoffs.
- In 2020, they started 11-0. They lost four of their final five and were blown out in the first round of the playoffs.
- In 2023, they started 7-4. They lost three in a row immediately after and were blown out in the first round of the playoffs.
- In 2024, they started 8-2. They lost five of their final seven and were blown out in the first round of the playoffs.
- In 2025, they started 4-1. They’ve lost six of their last 11 and will miss the playoffs if they lose Sunday’s finale against Baltimore.
Dating back to 2018, the last season of Ben Roethlisberger’s prime, Tomlin’s regular-season winning percentage is .614 before December 1 and .500 after it. Almost every recent Steelers season is a different version of the unfinished horse drawing meme.
Then there’s Tomlin’s record against the dregs of the league. His Steelers are 0-4-1 in their last five games against opponents that were at least eight games below .500 entering the matchup, tying an NFL record for futility. The Steelers are 1-6-1 in their last eight games in Cleveland; the Browns’ quarterbacks in those games were Tyrod Taylor, Baker Mayfield, Jacoby Brissett, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, Jameis Winston, and Shedeur Sanders. Letdowns like Sunday’s are known as Tomlin Specials for a reason.
And, of course, there’s his playoff résumé. Tomlin’s career postseason record is 8-11, a .421 winning percentage, 23rd out of 25 coaches with at least 15 career playoff games. Since 2011, he’s 3-9 in the playoffs, with his Steelers falling to teams led by Tim Tebow and Blake Bortles. He was also demolished in a home wild-card game against a Browns team that was missing its head coach, who was quarantined in a basement with COVID.
The only three Steelers playoff wins of the past 14 seasons came against the AJ McCarron–led Bengals in one of the most outrageous NFL games of the century, the Alex Smith–led Chiefs in a contest that was decided by a controversial holding penalty on a two-point conversion, and the Matt Moore–led Dolphins. That’s it. That’s the whole list. In Pittsburgh’s other nine playoff games during that span, the team has been outscored by 108 points and lost by double-digits six times. The only franchises that haven’t won playoff games more recently than the Steelers are the Cardinals, Panthers, Jets, Bears, Raiders, and Dolphins. That’s not great company!
Tomlin’s career is like that optical illusion where you can see either two faces or a vase. If you focus solely on his lack of a losing season, he’s been an unambiguous success. If you focus solely on his recent playoff history, he’s been an unambiguous failure.
The Case for Tomlin: He Gets Production Out of Players No One Else Can
In 2022, Tomlin made an appearance on The Pivot Podcast with former NFL players Ryan Clark, Channing Crowder, and Fred Taylor. One clip from his interview went viral, with Tomlin talking about the qualities he prioritizes as a coach.
I love coaches that resist the responsibility of coaches. That talk negatively about a dude that can’t learn, and blah, blah. Man, if everybody could learn, we’d need less coaches. If the group didn’t need management, then we wouldn’t make as much. I love reading draft evals, and somebody’s talking about anything other than pedigree. Talking about how poor somebody’s hand usage is. Well, that’s coaching. I don’t run away from coaching. I run to coaching. It all is in line with not seeking comfort. Because when you’re a coach that’s talking about somebody that can’t learn, you’re seeking comfort, because your teaching is struggling.
This wasn’t just lip service. Tomlin really does run to difficult coaching situations, and he’s been able to get production out of players that other coaches haven’t. He’s done this so much, in fact, that he’s developed a reputation as a problematic-superstar whisperer. And when many of those players have left the Tomlin ecosystem, things have often devolved quickly, both on and off the field. A few notable examples:
- Antonio Brown was the best receiver in the league from 2013 to 2018 under Tomlin, racking up 9,145 yards and 67 touchdowns despite doing stuff like dropkicking a punter in the face and Facebook livestreaming a postgame locker-room speech that was specifically about players staying off of social media. After Brown was traded to the Raiders in 2019, his career immediately imploded, and things got much darker once he retired. He has a long list of serious legal issues and was arrested in November on an attempted murder charge.
- Le’Veon Bell was one of the top running backs in the league under Tomlin and was named first-team All-Pro in both 2014 and ’17, despite being arrested for a DUI charge and suspended for violating the league’s substance abuse policy while on the Steelers roster. After holding out and then leaving Pittsburgh for the Jets, his production careened off a cliff: He rushed for more than 350 yards in a season only one more time, and he was out of the league entirely by 2022. In March of this year, Bell was ordered to pay $25 million in a sexual abuse lawsuit.
- Chase Claypool had a breakout rookie season with the Steelers in 2020, drawing comparisons to Calvin Johnson on the field despite frequently being criticized for his lack of professionalism and focus. He was traded to the Bears in 2022 and traded again to the Dolphins in 2023. He made just four receptions in Miami and hasn’t caught on with an NFL team since.
- Diontae Johnson was the Steelers’ leading receiver in 2021 and ’22 despite regularly causing internal strife and being known as a “big issue” in the locker room. Pittsburgh dealt him to the Panthers in March 2024; by the end of that year, he had been traded or cut three more times. He’s now out of the league.
That’s not to mention Roethlisberger, whom we’ll touch on more in a bit. There’s a reason the Steelers gambled on Aaron Rodgers this offseason. It wouldn’t work for other teams. But it might work for Tomlin!
An exception to this trend, of course, is George Pickens, whom Pittsburgh drafted in 2022 and sent to the Cowboys for draft capital in May. Pickens—who showed glimpses of greatness with the Steelers but was predominantly known for plays like this—has been mostly electric for Dallas, ranking third in the league in receiving yards (1,420) through 17 weeks. But even there, Pickens was panned for his performance on December 4 against the Lions, with NFL corner–turned–Prime Video analyst Richard Sherman saying that he “looked uninterested in playing football.” A week later, Pickens made three catches for 33 yards in a game that all but eliminated Dallas from the playoff picture. NBC commentator Cris Collinsworth remarked, “The effort honestly kinda looks the same tonight.”
The other player worth mentioning here is DK Metcalf, whom Pittsburgh acquired in a trade this offseason. Metcalf, who once swung a helmet at a teammate during Seahawks training camp, was suspended two games for taking a swipe at a fan during a game in Detroit on December 21. This dealt a brutal setback to an offense that relies on him: Metcalf has 850 receiving yards this season, 400 more than any other player on the Steelers. While that Detroit altercation is still being investigated, the NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero reported that Metcalf and the fan involved had history. Sources told Pelissero that Metcalf “reported the same fan to security last season while playing for Seattle” and that the fan “called Metcalf’s mom a derogatory word and called Metcalf ‘something we both know you don’t call a Black man.’”
The Case Against Tomlin: He Hires Coordinators No One Else Wants
One of the best ways to evaluate a coach’s impact is to look at his coaching tree. This not only shows how influential a coach’s philosophies are, but it also indicates how effective he is at constructing a staff that can maximize a roster’s talent. Andy Reid, who’s been a head coach for 27 seasons, has seen 11 of his former assistants go on to become full-time NFL head coaches. John Harbaugh, who’s been the Ravens’ head coach for 18 years, has seen eight of his former assistants land top jobs. Sean McVay, who is only 39 years old, has five such branches on his coaching tree; Kyle Shanahan has three.
Tomlin has one: Bruce Arians, who was the Steelers’ offensive coordinator through the end of the 2011 season before his contract was allowed to expire. But Arians—who went on to lead the Cardinals to three consecutive 10-win seasons and the Buccaneers to the Super Bowl LV victory after Tom Brady joined the team—was a holdover from Bill Cowher’s staff, as he originally came to Pittsburgh as the receivers coach in 2004. That means Tomlin has never hired an assistant who went on to become an NFL head coach.
Mathematically, this seems impossible. He’s been a head coach for nearly two decades! Do you know how many terrible candidates have gotten head coaching opportunities since the first iPhone was released? But perhaps it’s not surprising given whom Tomlin tends to hire. Since Arians left town, the Steelers’ offensive coordinators have been Todd Haley, Randy Fichtner, Matt Canada, and Arthur Smith—not exactly a who’s who of innovative minds. The team’s offense has regularly ranked near the bottom of the league, a trend that has worsened in recent years. From 2019 to 2024, Pittsburgh ranked 30th, 24th, 23rd, 23rd, 25th, and 23rd, respectively, in total yardage. (It’s 26th so far in 2025.) It ranked 31st, 21st, 24th, 18th, 27th, and 24th in EPA per play. (It’s 15th so far this year.)
Pittsburgh’s Offense by Advanced Metrics Since 2019
There’s a lot more that goes into being a good offensive coordinator than just calling plays, but Steelers coordinators haven’t seemed to excel at any of it. It’s not just that their preferred concepts don’t work; it’s that the experience of watching this offense is deeply, depressingly boring. This has led to lots of second-guessing from the fan base and former players alike. “We’ve had different offensive coordinators, different defensive coordinators, but it’s kind of been the same story,” Roethlisberger said December 2 on his Footbahlin podcast. “This looks a lot like Matt Canada’s offense.” Later that week, Smith told reporters, “This isn’t a business for the meek.”
Three years after leaving the Steelers staff, Haley was the offensive coordinator for Riverview High School in Sarasota, Florida. Since the ends of their tenures in Pittsburgh, neither Fichtner nor Canada has worked in football in any capacity. Smith, for his part, doesn’t seem to be trending in the right direction: In Sunday’s loss to Cleveland, the Steelers averaged 4.5 yards per play and went 3-of-18 on third- and fourth-down conversions. Tight end Pat Freiermuth, who led all Pittsburgh pass catchers with 63 receiving yards, had five targets; receivers Scotty Miller, Marquez Valdes-Scantling, and Adam Thielen, who combined for 60 receiving yards, had 21.
The Case for Tomlin: He’s Proved He Can Win With Bad QBs
The best coaching job of Tomlin’s career came in 2019, when Roethlisberger went down with a season-ending elbow injury in Week 2 and the Steelers staggered to a 1-4 start. Pittsburgh won eight of its next 10 games with a combination of Mason Rudolph and Duck Hodges at quarterback, despite the offense averaging 192.5 passing yards during that stretch. It didn’t matter. The team did more with less, and Hodges emerged as a fan favorite, to the point that locals started a petition to bring a 40-foot-tall inflatable rubber duck installation by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman back to Pittsburgh in Duck’s honor.
That season may seem like an anomaly, but this is what Tomlin does. His offense, as established above, routinely sputters. His clock management often leaves a lot to be desired. But his teams find ways to throw opponents off their rhythms, creating deliberately slow and ugly games. Mucking it up is a Tomlin feature, not a bug.
And he’s remarkably good at prevailing in close contests. Over the long haul, you would expect a coach’s record in one-score games to hover somewhere around .500. Tomlin is a career 111-68-2 (a .619 winning percentage) in such games, over a sample size that adds up to more than 10 full seasons. Since 2021, the Steelers are 47-36-1 overall despite having a point differential of –72. You might think that he can’t keep getting away with this, but somehow he always does.
Tomlin made the playoffs when Roethlisberger’s arm was completely cooked. He made the playoffs when alternating between Kenny Pickett, Mitchell Trubisky, and Rudolph at quarterback. He made the playoffs when juggling washed Russell Wilson and Justin Fields. The Tomlin Steelers are the embodiment of next-man-up culture—so long as the next man is perpetually a mediocre passer whose foremost goal is to not screw up.
The Case Against Tomlin: He’s Never Proved He Can Develop a QB
The NFL is a quarterback league. This has been true for decades, and it’s why so many front offices bet everything to acquire one. Sure, this has led to a litany of horrendous and unforgivable transactions, but given the context, it makes sense: The last time an AFC championship game was played without Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes was in 2010. The last time a Super Bowl champion had a full-season starting quarterback with a below-average QBR was in 2015 (the Broncos with Peyton Manning). Unless your quarterback possesses Big Nick Energy, it is extremely hard to win it all without an elite option behind center.
So while it’s inarguably impressive that Tomlin has won so many games with subpar quarterbacks, it’s worth reiterating: His Steelers have had subpar quarterbacks for the past seven seasons. Since Roethlisberger went down with an elbow injury in 2019, the team has made just one attempt to develop a franchise QB, and otherwise has lined up a series of Band-Aid solutions that have kept it stuck in no man’s land.
There are a few reasons for this, going back to Roethlisberger. When the Pittsburgh offense was at its best in the mid-to-late 2010s, Roethlisberger talked repeatedly about how he was contemplating retirement. Yet when the Steelers picked Rudolph in the 2018 draft’s third round, Roethlisberger was not happy and took to multiple outlets to air his frustration. “I plan on playing for three to five more years,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that May. “If [Rudolph] is going to be their guy, that’s great, but in my perfect world it’s not going to be for a while.” A few days later, he told the radio station 93.7 The Fan: “I was surprised when they took a quarterback because I thought that maybe in the third round, you know you can get some really good football players that can help this team now.”
In the aftermath, the Steelers all but kowtowed to Roethlisberger’s whims. For one, they didn’t adequately prepare Rudolph for when they would need him; he received minimal mentorship from Roethlisberger, and the team didn’t hire a quarterbacks coach who was not also serving as the offensive coordinator until it brought in Mike Sullivan in 2021. For another, they avoided drafting another QB for three consecutive years. The Steelers took Claypool four spots ahead of Jalen Hurts in 2020 when Roethlisberger was 38 and never had a quarterback succession plan that even remotely resembled the one that led to Rodgers’s exit in Green Bay.
This is not solely on Tomlin. The Steelers’ general manager at the time was Kevin Colbert, and others in the front office certainly shared their input. But Tomlin, by virtue of his position, inherently influenced the outcome. When Roethlisberger’s leadership style and playing ability came under fire at various points toward the end of his career, Tomlin loudly and repeatedly defended him. Then there’s this, from a 2019 Bleacher Report accounting of the Pittsburgh power dynamic: “It cannot be stressed enough how some coaches across the league believe Tomlin is playing with fire. Every quarterback, they say, even Tom Brady, has head-coaching guardrails. Some coaches believe that giving Roethlisberger that much power will eventually burn Tomlin.”
Roethlisberger retired after the 2021 season, and the Steelers finally used a top pick on a quarterback: Pickett, out of the University of Pittsburgh, with the 20th selection in the first round. But Pickett’s scouting report included several flaws—average arm strength, questionable decision-making, tiny hands—and he landed in an environment that was far less than ideal. His coordinator after being drafted was Canada, whose limitations as a play caller put a hard cap on how much the QB could develop. Pickett threw the same number of touchdowns and interceptions (13) over his two years on the team and was traded to the Eagles as part of a pick swap in March 2024.
Since the Pickett experiment fizzled, the Steelers have attempted a handful of veteran quarterback reclamation projects: Wilson, Fields, and now Rodgers. While the wins have kept coming, the stats paint a different picture: The team has produced just one 300-plus-yard passing game over the past two seasons. Rodgers has passed for more than 275 yards in a game for Pittsburgh only once. You might think this would mean that Tomlin has won by relying on rushing, but that’s not true either. The Steelers rank 21st in rushing success rate from the start of 2024 until now.
This is the Tomlin experience in a nutshell: His teams constantly outperform expectations, but part of the reason their expectations are low is because of his own professional shortcomings. He’s amazing at climbing out of holes; he’s also responsible for digging them.
Another common Steelers talking point is that they’ve had just three head coaches since 1969: Chuck Noll, Cowher, and Tomlin. This is usually framed as a positive, as a way to signal organizational stability. In an era that demands instant gratification, the Steelers are the antidote. They have patience. Owner Art Rooney II, like his father before him, takes the long view.
But what’s most striking is not that the Steelers have had only three head coaches in the last 56 years. It’s that they haven’t fired a head coach during that entire span. Noll announced his retirement in December 1991, after making one playoff appearance in the final seven years of his storied tenure. Cowher announced his retirement in January 2007, not two years removed from winning Super Bowl XL. The last head coach the Steelers fired was Bill Austin—who’d just completed a 2-11-1 campaign behind starting quarterback Dick Shiner—in 1968. Since then, the Raiders have fired 14 head coaches. The Jets have fired 10.
It doesn’t stop at head coach, either. The Steelers simply don’t do breakups. Rooney hasn’t fired a general manager this century. When Tomlin canned Canada for his performance in November 2023, it marked the franchise’s first in-season head coach or coordinator change since 1941. In explaining his decision to get rid of Canada, Tomlin said, “I just think you know when you’re there, to be blunt and short about the answer.” A few days earlier, then-Steelers running back Najee Harris was more transparent. “You could do two things,” Harris said. “You could look at the record and say, ‘OK, we’re still good right now.’ Or we could look at the record and be like, ‘If we keep playing this type of football, how long is that shit going to last?’ I look at it like, ‘How long that shit going to last?’ Y’all could look at it like it’s a good record, but I mean, it’s the NFL. Winning how we did, it’s not going to get us nowhere.”
The biggest drawback to the Steelers potentially firing Tomlin after this season is that they’d have no guarantee they could find someone better. Among the candidates being discussed in this coaching cycle, there is no coveted young coordinator like Ben Johnson, and no established NFL winner on a gap year like Mike Vrabel or Sean Payton. There are just predictable retreads (Mike McCarthy, Robert Saleh, and Kliff Kingsbury, among others) and promising but unproven up-and-comers (Joe Brady, Matt Burke, Chris Shula, and Jesse Minter). There is just the unknown, and the unknown is scary.
Yet as a famous philosopher once said, “We’re not going to live in our fears. We’re going to live in our hopes.” That philosopher was Mike Tomlin, explaining a 2015 fake field goal attempt gone horribly awry. His statement applies to decision-making as a whole. How long can fear be a deterrent? At what point does risk aversion become a risk itself? When does stability become just a carefully masked name for cowardice?
Tomlin is incredibly good at certain parts of his job. He’s incredibly lackluster at others. What’s clear, with his 19th season winding to a close, is that neither quality is likely to change. Tomlin may be coaching for his job on Sunday, as the Steelers may soon be forced to decide: How long will they settle for good but not good enough?
