Mike Tomlin, offensive football and coaching strategies

It is about what you have to work with. Not what you want to be.

We like to think of every coach in sports as having some sort of personal mindset or approach to their game. Their own system, their own way of doing things and their own philosophy.

An offensive coach.

A defensive coach.

An aggressive coach.

A passive coach.

While every coach might have their own personal preference, and their own ideas as to what they want their team to eventually look like, the best coaches are the ones that can adapt to the players they have. Taking what their players do well, what their players do not do well, and building a system and a scheme and a strategy around that.

It is not about forcing your players into a scheme.

It is about building a scheme around your players.

There are too many coaches in football that do the former. They also tend to be the ones that do not last long with their teams.

That is an area where I am not sure Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin gets enough credit. His background in the NFL is very much as a defensive coach. He started in Tampa Bay as a defensive backs coach, went to Minnesota as a defensive coordinator and came to the Steelers as a “defensive” head coach. The team played to that identity. They won the Super Bowl in 2008 on the strength of an all-time great defense, and for the first decade of his career with the Steelers consistently won with a defensive mentality.

That success, and most recently the struggles of the offense, have led to the perception — and perhaps criticism — that he has not kept up with the modern game, or that his philosophy is outdated for what the NFL is now.

I am not sure any of that is entirely fair.

For one, strong defense and a good running game will never go out of style in the NFL (to a point). That will always win you a lot of football games and give you a chance. It might have a ceiling without an elite quarterback, but it is the type of mentality that can at least keep you competitive without an elite quarterback.

For the better part of the past three or four seasons the Steelers offense has been one of the most painful groups to watch in the entire NFL. Everything safe. Take no chances. Punting is winning. Every game has been a rock fight. The belief is that is simply what Tomlin wants games to be.

Maybe he does. But you do not have to go back that far to find when the Steelers had one of the most dynamic and game-changing offenses in the entire NFL. Because that was where their talent resided. The defensive legends that built the 2008 and 2010 Super Bowl teams were going away, and it was not as easy to replace them. Instead of trying to win games 24-14, it was now about winning games 34-24. They mostly did.

Between the 2014 and 2018 seasons they were a dominant offensive team that was consistently among the top-10, and often times among the top-five in yards and points.

During that time they ranked 2, 3, 7, 3 and 4 in yards and 7, 4, 10, 8, and 6 in points.

They had an in-his-prime Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback, the best all-around running back in football in Le’Veon Bell, an all-time great talent at wide receiver in Antonio Brown, a freak of a talent in Martavis Bryant, Heath Miller at tight end and just some really good complementary pieces around them.

They didn’t hold them back. They didn’t try to turn games into defensive slugfests. They went out of their way to try and outscore every team as much as they could every single week. This was also around the time where Tomlin got into the habit of just randomly going for two point conversions early in games and after touchdowns.

He was not afraid of points or high-scoring games, and he pretty much turned these guys loose on opposing defenses.

Eventually, however, that talent started to go away.

Bell wanted to get paid as much money as humanly possible and left. Brown went insane. Bryant could not stay on the field. Roethlisberger and Miller got old. Replacing them, again, proved to be a challenge.

The result: A team that had started to rebuild the defensive side of the ball and an offense that just did not have the talent to play a high-octane game. So they had to slop it up. And they did.

All of that brings us to the 2024 Steelers and where they are as an offense going into Week 11 of the season. All of a sudden their offense, which has consistently been one of the worst and most unwatchable in football, is actually …. kind of decent.

They are 12th in points scored, 18th in yards and have shown considerable improvement across the board. Amazing what having an adult offensive coordinator in the building and a couple of competent quarterbacks can do. They are moving the ball and sustaining drives, they are not relying on turnovers and short fields for points, there is an element of a downfield passing game, even the running game looks better and more consistent. They are doing all of that with an offensive lineup that is full of backups and inexperienced, unproven players. There was a pretty clear demand and desire to get better on that side of the ball.

They have.

It again goes back, however, to actually having the personnel to do that. Especially at quarterback. I am happy to say I may have been wrong about what Russell Wilson has left and what he can still do. Even with Justin Fields there was still a pretty noticeable improvement.

They did not have anybody that could play at either level the past couple of years.

I know there was always constant screaming about trying to be more aggressive, and why do they not use the middle of the field, and why do they not pass downfield, but if you know the quarterbacks you have are not capable of playing that way, why would you ask them to? You can get into debates about whether or not they made the right choices at quarterback (which are fair), but once those choices were made, and once those players proved to be the players they were, the only other option you had at that point was to build around what they could and could not do. They could not do much.

If you ask Kenny Pickett and Mitch Trubisky to play like Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson it is not going to go well for them or for you. They are not capable of those things and playing at that level.

We are not used to seeing NFL coaches stick around long enough with teams where they have to adapt their philosophies and take vastly different approaches through multiple types of rosters. Most coaches only stick with a team for four or five years and get fired because they could not build the team they wanted or adapt their mindset to the team they had.

Tomlin has not only stuck around, he has had to adapt. He has. When he had James Harrison, Troy Polamalu, James Farrior and Ike Taylor he won with defense. When he had Ben Roethlisberger, Antonio Brown, Le’Veon Bell and Martavis Bryant he won with offense. When he had Kenny Pickett and Mitch Trubisky he had to win by playing slop. Now that he has Russell Wilson and Justin Fields you can kind of see the offense becoming something worth watching again. He does not get enough credit for that adaptability.