most lopsided home playoff loss in team history<\/a>.<\/p>\nThere were chants of \u201cFire Tomlin!\u201d as the clock kicked toward zero, though they weren’t nearly as impassioned as they were in November while the Steelers were getting pushed around by Buffalo in a loss that dropped their record to 6-6.<\/p>\n
Tomlin did his best to tune out the noise and his team responded, the way it seemingly always did during his tenure. Pittsburgh won four of its final five games, including a sweep of Baltimore that gave the club its first AFC North title since 2020.<\/p>\n
The optimism, however, dimmed once the Texans asserted themselves. The NFL’s top-ranked defense suffocated Aaron Rodgers and Pittsburgh’s offense while the league’s highest-paid defense wilted late.<\/p>\n
It was a familiar and frustrating pattern for a place where, as Tomlin noted not long after his introduction, \u201cthe standard is the standard.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while that remains the case for a team whose members walk by six Lombardi Trophies every day on the way to work, the results had plateaued. The Steelers finished with 9 or 10 wins in each of Tomlin’s final five seasons, often doing just enough to squeak into the playoffs before being exposed by a more talented opponent.<\/p>\n
Tomlin had two years left on the contract extension he signed in 2024, with the club holding the option for 2027. Should Tomlin want to return to coaching in the NFL before his contract with the Steelers expired, the club could seek compensation.<\/p>\n
Either way, his departure leaves the Steelers looking for a head coach for just the third time since they hired Noll in 1969.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh likely won’t lack for attractive candidates. The club’s stability combined with its ability to remain competitive even without a franchise quarterback for the last half-decade means whoever gets the job will be given substantial leeway to get the team back to the top.<\/p>\n
The announcement came as somewhat of a shock. In the final question he fielded as head coach, Tomlin painted an upbeat picture about the team’s future.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m always feel optimistic about what we\u2019re capable of doing in terms of putting together a group, certainly,\u201d he said Monday night.<\/p>\n
And with that, he stepped off the dais and into a future that will not lack for options. Long one of the most confident and imminently quotable people in football \u2014 his weekly news conferences were peppered with what became known as \u201cTomlin-isms\u201d \u2014 he could step into television if he wants, as Cowher did after retiring.<\/p>\n
Yet it seems just as likely that he will have his choice of jobs if or when he wants to coach again. Players defended Tomlin \u2014 almost uniformly popular within the locker room \u2014 to the end.<\/p>\n
Tight end Pat Freiermuth called Tomlin \u201cone of the best coaches I’ll ever play for, probably the best. In my opinion his message hasn’t got stale. I believe in him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Freiermuth added that his belief extended to general manager Omar Khan, who will be in charge of finding the right person for one of the most attractive coaching gigs in any league.<\/p>\n
Tomlin’s two predecessors are in the Hall of Fame. Tomlin could very well find himself getting fitted for a gold jacket of his own. Yet rather than try to come back next year and break Noll’s record for regular-season wins, he opted to, as Noll once famously put it, \u201cget on with his life’s work.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the Steelers will try to find the right person to help them return to the standard that the franchise lives by, one it clutched at but never quite grasped during Tomlin’s final years.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP NFL: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/nfl<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PITTSBURGH — Mike Tomlin was an unknown when the Pittsburgh Steelers plucked him from obscurity in 2007 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[43917,1165,303,7393,73,75,74,726],"class_list":{"0":"post-88358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-43917","9":"tag-article","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-nfl-football","12":"tag-pittsburgh","13":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","14":"tag-pittsburgh-news","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}