It is well past time to add a new term to the football lexicon: “Tomlining.” Definition: “To lose in an embarrassing fashion to a team you are heavily favored to beat.” Mike Tomlin’s Pittsburgh Steelers fell victim to Tomlining again on Sunday, losing by 15 points to the lowly Miami Dolphins – a team Pittsburgh was picked to top on the road by more than a touchdown.
Anyone still betting on the Steelers to win match-ups like these, let alone win them comfortably, should not be allowed to gamble, and probably went broke several years ago. Vegas insiders – or just those who casually follows the NFL – know by now that it’s never smart to pick the six-time Super Bowl champions to beat a bad football team. The Steelers’ latest humiliation wasn’t hard to see coming. Nor was their loss three weeks earlier to the Eagles, in another game most thought they’d win in a blowout, only to see the Steelers get routed 34-3. This is what the Mike Tomlin-Ben Roethlisberger era Steelers do. Every year. They lose to the teams everyone else beats. Detroit’s 0-16 mark in 2008 should have an asterisk because the Steelers weren’t on their schedule.
Pittsburgh’s record in its last 16 road games against sub-.500 teams on the road is now 5-11. And calling the Dolphins simply “sub-.500” and not straight “awful” is generous. They were dominated by the Titans and Bengals in their previous two games and only beat the Browns in overtime at home in week three thanks to Cleveland’s kicker missing a game-winner at the end of regulation. But against Pittsburgh, the team every loser wants on its schedule, they picked off Roethlisberger twice, shut down Antonio Brown, put up 30 points and dominated the game at the line of scrimmage as Jay Ajayi ran for 204 yards and two touchdowns, a performance I’m comfortable calling the greatest in NFL history by a British running back.
“No need to sugarcoat. We got beat soundly,” Tomlin said after the game, the standard meaningless cliche he delivers after each case of Tomlining in his 10 years at the helm in Pittsburgh. (For reasons of keeping this column under the length of a novel, only a few of the trademark defeats will be recounted here.) There was the 2009 loss to the 2-7 Chiefs when the Steelers were 6-3. “I take responsibility for that performance,” Tomlin said after that one. “I have to have this football team better prepared to play.” OK! Great! Two weeks later, the Steelers lost to the 3-8 Raiders and then followed that up with a defeat at the hands of the 1-11 Cleveland Browns.
The Steelers lost again to the Browns in 2012, when they were 6-4 and Cleveland was 2-8. “That was an ugly performance,” Tomlin said after the game. Two weeks later, they lost to the 4-8 Chargers. “I have no clue [why we’re inconsistent],” Roethlisberger chimed in after that one with some of his own clueless analysis. “If I knew, I don’t think we’d do it any more.” Good stuff. One year later the Steelers lost to an 0-3 Vikings team and a 2-4 Raiders team. One year after that, they fell to 0-3 Buccaneers and the 1-8 Jets. That Jets game is the greatest example of Tomlining of all, as the Steelers managed to put up just 13 points against the lowly Jets one week after Roethlisberger set an NFL record by throwing six touchdown passes in back-to-back games. “We’ll accept responsibility for what happened and get ready for our next opportunity,” Tomlin cliched in the moments following his masterpiece. There have been no less than three instances of Tomlining since.
Of course, all top NFL franchises get upset from time to time. Every opponent in the NFL is full of professionals who are talented and work hard and want to win. But no other team so consistently loses to the dregs of the league like Tomlin’s Steelers. They have 14 losses over the past six seasons to teams with a combined .195 winning percentage, while the Steelers entered those games with a combined winning percentage of .581. The college game long ago gave us “Clemsoning”, the act of inexplicably playing horribly in a big game, but Tomlining is far worse. The Steelers are not losing to good opponents, they’re falling to the worst of the worst and almost every time out.
“When I look at it, I don’t look at who we play or their record or things of that nature,” Tomlin said after Sunday’s Tomlining. “I look at how we perform. We didn’t perform well enough to win today.”
It’s probably time for Tomlin to look at things completely different and things of that nature if he ever wants to get back to the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh’s annual Tomlining isn’t just a nuisance or odd quirk of a champion: it’s a consistent problem that stacks the deck against a talented team each postseason. Pittsburgh hasn’t earned a first-round bye in the playoffs since making the Super Bowl in 2010 and that fact – and missing the postseason entirely in 2012 and 2013 with 8-8 records – is entirely thanks to Tomlining two or three times a season. Pittsburgh – on paper, at least – should be 6-0 right now and a game ahead of the Patriots in the AFC. Instead, they’re a game back and will almost inevitably fall two games behind this Sunday when Landry Jones welcomes the New England Patriots to Heinz Field. It’s mid-October and Pittsburgh’s shot at homefield in the AFC is all but gone. Hashtag: Tomlining.
It would at least be encouraging for Pittsburgh fans if Tomlin showed any recognition of the problem or attempted to change up his approach. But outside of losing to losers, Tomlin’s time as a head coach has been defined by his complete unwillingness to improve at his craft and his stubbornness in the face of criticism, no matter how constructive. Tomlin struggled with clock management when he took over the Steelers in 2007, as most rookie coaches do, but has not improved one iota in that regard and seems to wear that fact as a badge of honor.
Tomlin says he 'goes with his gut' on time-management decisions in games. Said he'd love to see Monday Morning QBs try the same. #Steelers
— Marc Sessler (@MarcSesslerNFL) March 22, 2016
That stubbornness seems to have permeated the team’s front office, as well. Roethlisberger’s latest injury is no surprise – he’s played 16 games just twice in the last eight years – yet Pittsburgh will now hand its team, supposedly built to compete for the Super Bowl, over to Jones indefinitely. Instead of having a capable veteran or young, quarterback-in-waiting on the roster, its Year Four of the Landry Jones Experience in Pittsburgh. Forget the No1 seed, with multiple games of Jones and another Tomlining or two – the Steelers play/lose to the winless Browns one month from now! – Pittsburgh could miss the playoffs entirely.
No one rational is calling for Tomlin’s job. His many flaws aside, he’s still one of the most successful head coaches in the league (although that may say more about the quality of the coaches in the NFL). Tomlin gets his teams prepared and fired up to take on the top teams with the best. He’s just incapable of beating the worst. That will likely prevent him from getting back to the Super Bowl. But the good news is: if the Steelers do make another Super Bowl, a 4-12 team won’t be waiting for them. That means they’ll have a chance to win.
