The Pittsburgh Steelers will have a new head coach for the first time in 19 seasons after Mike Tomlin stepped down from the role following this season’s loss in the Wild Card round to the Houston Texans.
The organization replaced Tomlin with Mike McCarthy. Notably, McCarthy won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers, with Pittsburgh’s 2025 quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, running the offense.
Rodgers may retire, and will be a free agent if he elects to return to the game, but if he does plan on giving it a go, Steelers owner Art Rooney II has announced that he’d like to know much sooner in this offseason than heading into the 2025 season, when Rodgers didn’t sign until just before mandatory minicamp.
“We don’t know what Aaron’s plans are right now, and that did not weigh heavily in the decision,” Rooney said, according to the Steelers’ official website. “We’ll see where Aaron is, and we’ve left the door open, but obviously we all have to sit down and see if that makes sense. So that’ll happen sometime in the next month or so. But the decision was made based on Mike being the coach we want, and it really had very little to do with whether Aaron is going to be back or not.”
Fans reacted to the announcement on social media.
“Good luck with that- Hello Darkness, my old Friend,” one Packers fan wrote on Twitter.
“You’d think that franchise would know that Aaron only works on his timeline,” someone else added.
“No offseason would be complete without this,” another person said of Rodgers’ decision-making related news.
It’ll be interesting to see what direction McCarthy takes the franchise in.