After a disastrous stretch to close out the 2024 season—capped off with a blowout loss against the Ravens on Wild Card Weekend—Mike Tomlin is under fire as many fans and NFL analysts believe he should be on the hot seat. Tomlin's Super Bowl with the Steelers felt like a lifetime ago, and the results have been ugly in recent years.
With the loss to Baltimore, Tomlin continues a despicable eight-year drought without a playoff win. Additionally, the Steelers have just three postseason wins over the past 14 seasons. These came when facing quarterbacks AJ McCarron, Matt Moore, and Alex Smith.
But despite the perennial disastrous results when it matters most, there are those who will forever be in Tomlin's corner because of what he did very early in his tenure with the team. ESPN writer and analyst Bill Barnell is one of those folks.
Recently, Barnell wrote a piece about the biggest questions for teams that lost on Wild Card Weekend and spoke on the Tomlin situation. Barnwell admits that Steelers fans have earned a right to expect more from their team in the playoffs, but is opposed to moving on from Tomlin because he believes it's a decision fans will regret.
"I suspect the Steelers will run things back for another year without major changes, in part because doing anything else would force the organization to face difficult truths about where it stands and how it's operating," Barnell wrote on ESPN. "There's nothing wrong with being a perennial 10-win team and making it to the postseason, but Steelers fans have five decades worth of reasons to expect more. If whatever percentage of the fan base gets its wish and Tomlin goes, I believe it would be a decision they regret."
Steelers have every reason to make a head coaching change in 2025
Barnell got some things right with what he wrote. The grass isn't always greener on the other side. We know that from Pittsburgh's failed experiments at the quarterback position after moving on from an aging Ben Roethlisberger. However, in this case, the Steelers are running out of excuses to keep Mike Tomlin around.
Honestly, somebody needs to make a better case for Tomlin than just, 'You might regret it' scare tactics. Anyone could say this about any coaching decision made. Sure, it's possible the Steelers could regret moving on from Tomlin, but is the plan to change head coaches, regardless of how poorly things go?
If you were to make a pros and cons list to decide whether Tomlin should stay, the cons would grossly outweigh the pros at this point. Though players enjoy playing for him and he's never had a losing season, the Steelers have been getting trounced in every playoff appearance in recent years and haven't felt like a true Super Bowl contender since 2017.
Tomlin is also solely responsible for his disgraceful coaching hires that routinely fall short (Randy Fichtner, Matt Canada, and Teryl Austin, to name a few), and his defense—the highest-paid unit in the NFL—hasn't come close to resembling a competent performance in the postseason in recent years.
There's no question the Steelers could do far worse than Mike Tomlin as their head coach, but this team is beyond stagnant at this point and desperate for real change. You can make a case to keep Tomlin, but simply saying fans may 'regret' the decision isn't good enough.