“I kind of liked that ‘Pittsburgh Macho’ stuff. I like the fact that he’s a tough guy. I think he’s a players’ coach, but [he] also understands the bounds of that. I think he’s a good fit for us.” 

– Packers general manager Ted Thompson, explaining why he hired Mike McCarthy as the Green Bay Packers’ 14th head coach, during McCarthy’s introductory news conference on Jan. 12, 2006.

GREEN BAY — A few weeks ago, Mike McCarthy was crossing the Highway 172 bridge that spans the Fox River, headed to his suburban Green Bay home in his oversized black 4 x 4 truck — the one he used to park in the loading dock area of Lambeau Field during his nearly 13 years as the Green Bay Packers head coach.

The NFL season was in full swing, and for the second time in his post-Packers life, he was living full-time in Titletown but not coaching the iconic football team based there.

The first time had been in 2019, when he’d spent a year out of the game after being fired by the Packers with four games left in the 2018 season. And after parting ways with the Dallas Cowboys following the 2024 season after five years as their head coach — McCarthy and owner Jerry Jones did negotiate an extension after McCarthy coached out the final year of his existing deal, but the team’s offers didn’t provide the longer-term commitment he was seeking — he was once again out of work.

Instead, he was serving as a full-time, unpaid Uber driver for his and wife Jessica’s two teenage daughters, carting them around to all their various school and extracurricular activities.

And McCarthy was loving every minute of it.

He missed the game, sure, and wasn’t ruling out the idea of coaching again. But, he said, it would take a special opportunity to get him to jump back in. He wasn’t about to coach just to coach.

That’s because the time away not only meant he was getting to spend more time with Jess and the girls, but that he could make regular trips back to his native Pittsburgh to see his parents, Joe and Ellen.

With both of them in their 80s, and having spent three decades coaching in the NFL, he’d rarely been back to his hometown, so he was traveling back every few weeks, trying to make up for lost time.

On Saturday, almost 20 years to the day since then-general manager Ted Thompson referred to him as “Pittsburgh Macho” while introducing him as the Packers new head coach, that special coaching opportunity came to life:

McCarthy agreed to become the head coach of the team he’d grown up rooting for — the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Talk about a homecoming.

“Mike, as much as anybody, talks about where he came from,” four-time NFL MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers once said. “[Every] Saturday morning, when we are talking about the game plan, we usually start with story time — and he is usually always relating some story back to Pittsburgh and his father’s bar and his friends.”

McCarthy becomes just the Steelers’ fourth head coach since 1969, succeeding Mike Tomlin, who stepped away earlier this month after 19 seasons in charge — including during the 2010 season, when McCarthy’s Packers beat Tomlin’s Steelers in Super Bowl XLV.

The MVP of that game, of course, was Rodgers, who spent his first 18 seasons with the Packers, winning two of his four NFL MVP awards before two star-crossed seasons with the New York Jets and quarterbacking the Steelers in 2025.

The 42-year-old Rodgers is not under contract for 2026, but both the team and the quarterback had signaled that they were open to another year together. Although Rodgers and McCarthy didn’t always see eye-to-eye during their 13 seasons together in Green Bay, a reunion might be just what Rodgers is looking for when contemplating a 22nd NFL season.

McCarthy was one of seven candidates the Steelers interviewed during their search, having had his second interview with the team in person on Wednesday.

Steelers owner and team president Art Rooney II said last week that the Steelers, who finished 10-7 this season but lost their AFC first-round playoff game at home to the Houston Texans. Pittsburgh hasn’t won a postseason game in a decade.

But, the 63-year-old McCarthy’s hiring means he’ll have coached three of the NFL’s iconic franchises, with the Steelers, Cowboys and Packers having won a combined 15 Super Bowl championships — exactly 1/4 of them, with Super Bowl LX set to be played in two weeks.

And McCarthy, who was seven years old and living in the Greenfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh — where his dad owned Joe McCarthy’s Bar & Grill on Alcorn Street — when the Steelers won their first world title in 1975, will be tasked with getting the Steelers to their first Super Bowl since his Packers beat them in February, 2011.

“That’s my first memory. It was all about watching Steeler games,” McCarthy once said of the Steelers’ Super Bowl IX victory over the Minnesota Vikings. “That’s a part of the fiber of growing up in Pittsburgh. It’s the same thing in Wisconsin. It’s very, very similar. It’s all about your home team.

“I just remember the reaction of the town when they won the first Super Bowl. It was incredible. A lot of positive memories from the ‘70s. I watched them at home, or we watched a lot of them down at my father’s bar. Because Sunday was a day we would work and clean the bar. He didn’t have the Sunday license, so we were closed on Sundays.

“Everybody’s proud to be where they’re from. Growing up, people would ask you, ‘Where are you from?’ I’d always tell them, ‘Greenfield.’ I never even said I was from Pittsburgh because I was so proud of where I was from. And that’s just the way it was.

“Back in those days, you hardly even left your community in Greenfield because you had everything there to do. That’s the pride that I was brought up with — and you see that in everybody that grew up in Western Pennsylvania.

“That’s my life. That’s where I grew up.”

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