I’ve wanted him out since the days when he couldn’t get past Belichick in the playoffs, a few times when I felt we had the superior team. His playoff record since then is atrocious. Sure, he hasn’t had a QB, but the sample size is pretty big now. And in most of our playoff failures, there are clear gaps in preparedness which seem to lead to demise-creating mistakes. While it’s hard to blame him for the Antonio Brown problems, I felt Brown live-streaming from the locker room was a sign of poor leadership and lack of team discipline. The last 4 games are a microcosm, with stupid mistakes (mostly fumbles) leading to all the losses. The Steelers could have easily gone 2-2 in these games, securing the division, but our style of play and talent level doesn’t allow for any margin of error.
All this being said, I still feel good about playing the Ravens next week. I feel like it’s a coin flip game, as usual with these teams.
No matter how this past month has gone for Pittsburgh you know that Ratbird fans felt a chill go down their spine. That game can go either way, on paper the Rats should win, but Playoff Lamar is historically different and he’s 2-4 lifetime against Pittsburgh.
We’ll see how it goes. Stranger things have happened.
Tomlin is kind of like Tom Landry. A 20-year consecutive no-losing-season streak, numerous appearances in conference title game, but also often falling frustratingly 1 or 2 games short in the playoffs earlier than expected.
I hope the embarrassment of being a 2-score dog to a team that we usually expect to beat lights a fire under us. In fact, The Athletic has the Steelers dead last of all 14 playoff teams to win the SB, at 0.4%. Yep, they have Denver, LAC and Houston as AFC teams all having higher probabilities.
ETA: I know that Steelers and Ravens are about as even as you can get historically, but we still expect to beat them most years.
That spread is insane. The last game was the biggest margin of victory between the two teams in a decade. Take the points and make some money.
So today is maybe it. They have a decent chance, a Steelers-Rats game is never a foregone conclusion, but they have to play better than they have recently, or at least they have to start off playing out of the gate instead of waiting until halftime down two scores. The Rats have two big problems today: Zay Flowers is out, and it’s January so it’s Playoff Lamar time.
Now that I’m home, I’ll say something I said last week and a few other times this season: I don’t know why they start their games like this. They look lost, overmatched, and unprepared every week even though they’re clearly not because they then outplay the team that smoked them in the second half. It’s a constant thing, and it doesn’t make any sense. If they came out of the gate like they did out of the locker room for the second half they’d hardly ever have lost.
But that’s water under the bridge now, at least this season. They need to make sure that doesn’t keep happening next season.
So, to tie a bow on this, they outplayed virtually every pundit’s expectations and made the playoffs. Like every fan I wish they’d have won and kept going, but they exceeded my expectations and gave me a pretty good season to watch. That’s good enough for me. Now to see what the front office does this year. Last offseason was absolutely wild by Pittsburgh standards, and most of it worked out pretty well. Let’s see if they can continue to improve the team. They’ll need to address the QB spot again and they need receivers, at least one more good one, and more offensive line help. I think they’ll let Najee Harris go unless he’s willing to accept a much smaller contract than what I’m sure he’s hoping for.
So, a curious question: What exactly made/makes Tomlin good?
The guy is obviously good; nobody gets 20 consecutive non-losing seasons in the NFL (and all those playoff appearances) without being good. But what is it specifically? His playcalling seems typical. He doesn’t seem particularly aggressive or bold. He doesn’t seem particularly innovative. Is he a guy with great leadership who commands a locker room well? Is he particularly good at attracting free-agent talent to Pittsburgh and drafting well? etc, etc.
Over the years it seems like he worked well with the GM and the Rooneys. He has input, but there’s no evidence that he has any control over personnel decisions so he’s left with coaching the players he’s given. He’s proven to be good at dealing with players, he gets the best out of them and knows when to cut them loose, the ultimate proof of that is that when they go somewhere else they don’t do anything except make fools out of themselves or completely underperform. The players love him, he’s very well respected in the league, and his record speaks for itself.
The one thing he doesn’t do well is pick coordinators and assistant coaches. He’s had some good ones indeed, but they’ve largely been misses in the last decade. I get that the good ones move on to greener pastures, but guys like Randy Fichtner and Matt Canada haven’t proven to be very good at developing an effective offense. They had way too much talent to come up short all those years, though to be fair they were blocked repeatedly by the Patriots (and the refs, Jesse James caught that ball).
The other problem is that his success makes getting over the top difficult because unless a team gets really lucky in the draft it’s virtually impossible to get a franchise QB as low as they draft every year. They’d need to give away their future to move up or have a bad year, after which people would really be calling for his head. But in today’s NFL a top-shelf QB is necessary, so it seems like the Steelers are forever treading water.
It’s frustrating, yes, but if you’re honest with yourself there’s nobody out there that will do any better, and in fact virtually anyone else will do worse. Aside from Belichick he’s the winningest coach of the last 25 years. That’s not an accident.
As an aside, yesterday during the telecast it was mentioned that Tomlin and Harbaugh have faced each other 36 times, counting yesterday. Only George Halas and Curly Lambeau faced each other more times, with 49 meetings.
