One of the rarest job openings in the world currently has a vacancy for just the third time in 57 years. For the first time since 2007, Mike Tomlin is no longer the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Tomlin stepped aside as the coach after the team’s blowout loss to the Houston Texans in the AFC Wild Card round this past weekend. The 30-6 final score is far closer than the way the actual gameplay unfolded; Houston completely dominated Tomlin’s team, which was spared a more egregious scoring margin by three Texans giveaways.
Thus ended the Steelers latest slightly above-average season under Tomlin, a status his Pittsburgh teams claimed as a birthright. Tomlin coached the Steelers for 19 seasons. He never coached a team that lost more games than it won. That’s right; 19 straight winning seasons--a truly astonishing accomplishment in an NFL where even the top franchises have the occasional 5-12 hiccup season. Not Tomlin’s Steelers.
Even so, the amazing string of winning seasons obscured the hard reality that the Steelers were not realistic Super Bowl contenders. They haven’t been for years, despite the winning records and playoff appearances.
That’s evidenced in Pittsburgh’s prolonged playoff victory drought. They haven’t won a postseason game since advancing to the AFC Championship game following the 2016 season. Six straight playoff losses include a humiliating home defeat to the lowly Cleveland Browns, who pulled that off in 2020 with their head coach, Kevin Stefanski, locked in his own basement. Only one of the six losses featured a competitive second half of football; all but one saw Tomlin’s trademark defense give up at least 30 points.
The sustained mediocrity, the perennial status of being too good to be bad but not good enough to make a dent in the postseason, has become what Tomlin’s Steelers are known for, unfortunately. Based on their current situation, remaining in that mid-level purgatory was likely to be a real challenge for Tomlin, even as outstanding of a head coach as he has proven to be.
The Steelers are not a team on the rise, to be blunt. Their quarterback is what’s left of Aaron Rodgers, all 42 years of him. The wear and tear certainly shows. Rodgers can no longer win with his legs, and his passing range and velocity aren’t near his Hall of Fame prime anymore. He’s still better than, say, Justin Fields or Kenny Pickett--to name two recent Steelers QB investments--but Rodgers isn’t the future. The Texans game, as well as the loss to those lowly Browns in Week 17 proved that.
Rodgers isn’t the only prominent Steelers player on the wrong side of the career arc. T.J. Watt is 31 and still recovering from the team’s training staff partially collapsing his lung with a dry needling accident. Jalen Ramsey, the team’s top DB, is 31 and lost at least one step in coverage in 2025. Cam Heyward, still far and away the team’s best interior DL, is 36. No. 1 wideout DK Metcalf is 29, coming off his worst season and counts over $30 million against the Pittsburgh salary cap in each of the next three years. It will cost more to cut Metcalf than the savings gained by eliminating his salary until the 2028 season. Even with a bounce-back year from Metcalf, if such a thing exists, the Steelers have a bottom-tier returning WR corps in 2026.
Tomlin knows all this. He calculated those hard facts as being more important than the solid, high-floor young core that gives the Steelers promise. The defensive front is still a very good one, and the secondary (if healthy) is solid. Few teams are better at TE and RB than Pittsburgh. The youngsters on the offensive line are already pretty good and have more upside. Rodgers is still capable even at his advanced age.
It’s hard to fault Tomlin for wanting off the ride after years of running a flat roller coaster. Another season of extracting every ounce of success from his team just to squeak into the postseason and get clobbered by a better, younger team? Tomlin has seen that movie for a decade now. He’s lived that Groundhog Day enough to walk away from the Steelers.
It could not have been an easy decision for Tomlin. But it’s the right one, at the right time.