The Seattle Seahawks are Super Bowl champions, and based on how dominant they were in 2025, nobody should be surprised by the results we witnessed in Super Bowl LX. The Seahawks led all teams in DVOA while finishing first in point differential in defensive EPA per play. The Pittsburgh Steelers should take note.
It didn't take an elite, franchise quarterback for Seattle to bring home their second Lombardi trophy; they did it with reclamation QB Sam Darnold. What helped get them to the biggest game on turf was the remarkable drafting by general manager John Schneider in recent years.
Unfortunately, the Seahawks possessed one thing during their Super Bowl run that the Steelers can't replicate: a brilliant young coaching staff.
Seattle found the perfect recipe for success with an elite play-calling duo of Mike Macdonald and Kilnt Kubiak. Macdonald, who was a second-year head coach in 2025, was the first head coach who was also a defensive play-caller to ever win the Super Bowl (there have been plenty of defensive-minded head coaches, but not those who also called plays).
On the other side of the ball, the Seahawks had a brilliant young mastermind in Kubiak. The 38-year-old manipulated top-flight defenses all season, and his phenomenal work earned him the head coaching job in Las Vegas.
Now a harsh reality sets in: the Steelers don't have the coaching staff to model their team after the Seahawks.
The Pittsburgh Steelers don't have the coaching staff to replicate the Seattle Seahawks' Super Bowl model
In recent years, there seems to three avenues for teams to not only get to the Super Bowl, but to ultimately win the biggest game of the year: they need to have an elite quarterback and head coach combination (like Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid), they need to have an elite coaching staff and a talented roster (like the 2025 Seattle Seahawks), or they need to have a competant coaching staff and an elite roster (like the 2024 Philadelphia Eagles).
The Steelers are straight out of luck with the first model. This team hasn't picked high enough in 20 years to land an elite-level quarterback without (and that might not change anytime soon).
Sadly, they can't replicate what the Seahawks just did. It's not that Mike McCarthy is a bad coach, but he's a well-known floor-raiser—a coach (much like Mike Tomlin before him) who can get teams to 10 and 11-win seasons. But with three playoff wins over the past 13 seasons, his teams haven't been able to keep up in the postseason.
While McCarthy is a quality play-caller, the combination of McCarthy and defensive coordinator Patrick Graham—who has an underwhelming track record without top success—won't hold a candle to what Macdonald and Kubiak did with the Seahawks.
If the Steelers wanted to model their team after Seattle, they should have taken swings on innovative coaches, much like the Ravens did this offseason. Baltimore signed a young defensive mind and play-caller in Jesse Minter as their head coach, hired Ben Johnson's understudy in Declan Doyle as their OC, and hired the well-respected Anthony Weaver as their DC.
Simply put, the Steelers' 2026 coaching hires look nothing like the staff the Seahawks had in 2025.
In all honesty, Pittsburgh's best and most realistic route to future Super Bowl success is to model what the Eagles built in Philadelphia by the 2024 season. The Eagles had a quality coaching staff with a competent head coach in Nick Sirriani and a stable QB in Jalen Hurts. However, their best attribute was building a championship roster—mostly by means of the NFL Draft.
There's hope that the Pittsburgh Steelers can be legitimately competitive under new head coach Mike McCarthy, but they simply don't have the elite coaching staff to find Super Bowl success like the Seattle Seahawks just did.