For Pittsburgh Steelers fans, it is a love/hate relationship with head coach Mike Tomlin. Despite the fact he’s never had a losing season, has a Super Bowl and a .645 win percentage. But over the course of the last 12 months, Tomlin has proven he can coach up an undermanned team.
Tomlin dealt with the one thing every coach dreads the most. Losing their franchise quarterback. When Ben Roethlisberger went down halfway through the team’s second game it would have been easy to fold up the tents and call it a season. But Tomlin’s resolve never wavered. Even as he continued to shuffle the roster to account for injury after injury the goal was always to stay competitive and win.
But bigger than that, Tomlin needs some credit for having kept Antonio Brown in check as long as he did. All the craziness Brown has done in the last year, going all the way back to the week before the final game of the 2018 season, cannot be new. But aside from a few blips on the media radar, these things weren’t issues. But seeing how Brown has completely melted down over the last 12 months really puts Tomlin’s ability to manage his players in perspective.
Tomlin won’t win Coach of the Year because the team ran out of gas in the final three games. But when you look at everything this team went through this season and everything he kept under control in the years previously, it’s hard to argue against him as the best coach for this team.
