Mike Tomlin is finally opening up about why he walked away from the Pittsburgh Steelers after nearly two decades, and his answer was blunt: the regular season standard held, but the postseason results did not.
In his first interview since leaving Pittsburgh and joining NBC Sports as an NFL analyst, Tomlin told Maria Taylor that his decision was not sudden. Still, he made it clear that the Steelers’ extended playoff drought factored into the timing.
“It’s probably not an overnight decision,” Tomlin said. “There’s a loneliness with leadership. I just thought it was a good time for me, personally. And by that, I mean just where I am in life. And I thought it was a good time for the organization, to be quite honest with you. We didn’t have a lot of success in the playoffs in recent years.”
That last line is the one Steelers fans will sit with.
Tomlin never had a losing season in 19 years as Pittsburgh’s head coach, an NFL-record streak that became central to his legacy. He finished his Steelers run with a 193-114-2 regular-season record, eight division titles, 13 playoff appearances, two Super Bowl trips, and a win in Super Bowl XLIII. At 36, he became the youngest head coach to win a Super Bowl at the time.
But the second half of his tenure carried a different weight. Pittsburgh has not won a playoff game since the 2016 season and has not reached the Super Bowl since the 2010 campaign. Tomlin’s final game with the Steelers was a 30-6 wild-card loss to the Houston Texans, extending the franchise’s postseason frustration and closing his run in Pittsburgh in ugly fashion.
Now, Tomlin is moving into the booth instead of back onto the sideline. He recently joined NBC’s Football Night in America, following a path similar to former Steelers coach Bill Cowher, who transitioned to television after leaving Pittsburgh in 2007.
Tomlin also weighed in on one of the biggest questions still hanging over the Steelers: whether Aaron Rodgers will return for another season. Tomlin said that after spending a year around Rodgers, he believes the quarterback still has too much love for the game to walk away.
“I think he has an addiction to that, and there’s only one way to feed it,” Tomlin said. “And certainly, he is still capable and in really good shape. And so I think at the end of the day, he’ll play football.”
