Noooooo (Tomlin 2 year extension)

[Superman]

some nonsensical videos.
didn't see that coming

................

 

[Vader]

Too bad Ben didn't cover up a multitude of sins in the playoff loss to the Ravens.

To bad Tomlin can't draft a defense to keep the rats from scoring 30 points AT HOME.

 

[Bigappleyinzer]

some nonsensical videos.
didn't see that coming

Grumpy response from a grumpy poster? Check.

Yep- This thread has potential.

 

[Litos]

I am not happy with this. Rooney extends his contract after seeing him out coached most sundays. Well, it's roonys money and he can waste it if he wants to.

good thing it doesn´t affect the cap or the place would be on DEFCON 1

 

[Bigappleyinzer]

Not discounting anything. Put Brown and Bell with Kordell and this defense and how many wins do you have? Ben is often being discounted because people forget how good he is at what he does.

Whether you like it or not- it is a 3 headed monster.

Just take a look at how ordinary Ben looked in the playoffs without Bell.

 

[Vader]

Whether you like it or not- it is a 3 headed monster.

Just take a look at how ordinary Ben looked in the playoffs without Bell.

Ben won a SB with Parker. A good RB but he's no Bell. It has nothing to do with me liking it. Ben is the key cog whether you like it or not. Again keep Bell and Brown and put Kordell in there and you don't sniff a playoff game.

 

[deljzc]

I don't see the need to do the extension now, with 2 years left on his current deal.

I've said all off-season, if ownership was disappointed with the lack of a playoff win since 2010, two missed playoff appearances in the last 3 seasons and a declining defense that hasn't shown any reason to rebound, the way to express that disappointment was to hold off on the team's modus operendi and not give him an extension.

Instead they made him a top-5 paid coach in the league.

Way to send a message Art.

I question whether the Rooney's like stability for stability's sake and don't give a **** about the product as long as they are average to good. I've never felt the energy from Art Rooney to be a great team and seem very comfortable being 10-6 every year and hoping for a run in the playoffs (when we make it). That's certainly good for the bottom line I guess.

 

[In Ben We Trust]

The whiners just don't get it. I am not a huge Tomlin fan but who is going to do better? You people act like the Rooneys are just going to go out and find an amazing replacement for Tomlin just like that. Not going to happen. The Steelers had a fantastic run, appearing in 3 super bowls, winning 2. Those players aged and the current team (especially the defense) appears to be rebuilt and improved. Tomlin's not the best, but the Steelers could do FAR worse in terms of their head coaching position.

 

[TDX27]

He has won better than 2/3 of his games. So, how has he been out-coached on most Sundays?

 

[SteelerInLebanon]

Who gives a **** about what bunghole fans salivate over? Their perspective on failures and successes, is not my (nor most Steeler fans') perspective on failures and successes

Which tends to explain why so many other teams fans thinks of us as spoiled brat ********. While I hold my team to a high standard I also have to appreciate the fact that we can. Bitching about .500 seasons is ok as long as you keep in perspective we really have very little to truly ***** about compared to most of the league. I am embarrassed to come on after a lost and see how truly pathetic we as fans look and sound afterwards. You would think we were Bengals fans or worse. Step back and look at the way we ***** from another teams perspective. It is not pretty.

 

[SteelBuckeye]

Nothing much to add here. I figured it would get done around camp and it was. Hopefully it works out and we can get another ring.

 

[deljzc]

He has won better than 2/3 of his games. So, how has he been out-coached on most Sundays?

Based on what Vegas thinks going into the games, we've won just about the right amount. When you have the better quarterback and some of the defensive stars we've had from the previous regime, you're going to be favored to win against many opponents right?

So just because you win, on average, the exact amount you're supposed to, that makes you a good coach?

Doesn't make any sense.

The only credit Tomlin deserves is not tearing it all down making it WORSE. But I'm not sure there's any proof at all he's made this team BETTER.

The Bengals, with Marvin Lewis, have made the playoffs just as many time as Tomlin/Roethlisberger since 2007.

What is different is Tomlin has had TWO playoff runs while Lewis has not. Tomlin's still flamed out of the playoffs once-and-done three times (Lewis has done it 5 times).

So the so-called "difference" between Tomlin and Lewis are those two deep runs in the playoffs when Tomlin was gifted with FAR superior talent at quarterback and FAR superior talent on Defense (two Defensive Players of the Years when we had those two runs).

Take those two "runs" away and you see a surprisingly similar stretch to Marvin Lewis or Lovie Smith or Sean Payton and a slew of other coaches.

And again, I haven't seen one aspect of Tomlin's coaching ability that isn't replaceable. What exactly does he do much better than an average NFL coach?

 

[SteelBuckeye]

Take Willie Parker's long runs away ... and you have ..
Take Ben's 2 huuuge games last year away .... and you have
Take Tomlin's two "runs" way .... and you have

Sure seems to me that if you have to "take this or that away" in order for someone to be average, they weren't average in the first place.

 

[deljzc]

They were the team's runs on the backs of players Tomlin never selected or choose. He did it with a coaching staff in place when he arrived.

As far as I can tell, he turned the lights off, pushed the play button on the Phil Collins tape and thought he was coaching.

And the question really is, what are the chances we DO WORSE if we fire him vs. the chances we can do BETTER.

Everyone defending the move seems to think the next guy coming through the door will be so much worse. My point is actually Tomlin's not that hard to find someone similar in ability and the organization naturally props him up and covers his weaknesses. Advantages any coach brought in would gain as well.

I think a thorough coaching search would yield at LEAST 2-3 candidates similar in coaching ability to Tomlin and likely better.

But this ownership group will always err on the side of caution when it comes to coaching changes in the name of stability.

The question really debated here isn't about Tomlin, but his track record.

If you think he's overachieved over his 8 seasons here, then you like the move (and the only logical way to come to that conclusion is to GREATLY weigh the Super Bowl run vs. his year-to-year consistency).

I think he's underachieved. I think 3 one-and-dones (two at home, road game as a 7 point favorite) and 3 missed playoffs while having a hall-of-fame quarterback is underachieving. The Super Bowl run in 2008 just does not make up for those missed opportunities in my opinion. Especially now that we're 6 years removed from it.

If you disagree and like his resume of three underachieving season for every one great season then you will like the move.

Hopefully we get that ONE great season once in the next 4 he's now under contract. Because I think we have three clunkers coming.

 

[antdrewjosh]

Hahahahaha

 

[Tibs]

And the question really is, what are the chances we DO WORSE if we fire him vs. the chances we can do BETTER..

How is that even a question when he just signed a $7M/year contract extension that runs through 2018?

But this ownership group will always err on the side of caution when it comes to coaching changes in the name of stability.

Correct, and that's why we - or at least most of us - love this franchise and makes us the envy of the league.

 

[antdrewjosh]

This **** is hilarious.

 

[slashsteel]

The whiners just don't get it. I am not a huge Tomlin fan but who is going to do better? You people act like the Rooneys are just going to go out and find an amazing replacement for Tomlin just like that. Not going to happen. The Steelers had a fantastic run, appearing in 3 super bowls, winning 2. Those players aged and the current team (especially the defense) appears to be rebuilt and improved. Tomlin's not the best, but the Steelers could do FAR worse in terms of their head coaching position.

Well.... yinz might have had me until this comment.

SB caliber O I can live with....improved D? I have to see that in this years version to go with it. Until then they have potential to sway to either side of the good/bad pendulum.

 

[SteelBuckeye]

They were the team's runs on the backs of players Tomlin never selected or choose. He did it with a coaching staff in place when he arrived.

As far as I can tell, he turned the lights off, pushed the play button on the Phil Collins tape and thought he was coaching.

And the question really is, what are the chances we DO WORSE if we fire him vs. the chances we can do BETTER.

Everyone defending the move seems to think the next guy coming through the door will be so much worse. My point is actually Tomlin's not that hard to find someone similar in ability and the organization naturally props him up and covers his weaknesses. Advantages any coach brought in would gain as well.

I think a thorough coaching search would yield at LEAST 2-3 candidates similar in coaching ability to Tomlin and likely better.

But this ownership group will always err on the side of caution when it comes to coaching changes in the name of stability.

The question really debated here isn't about Tomlin, but his track record.

If you think he's overachieved over his 8 seasons here, then you like the move (and the only logical way to come to that conclusion is to GREATLY weigh the Super Bowl run vs. his year-to-year consistency).

I think he's underachieved. I think 3 one-and-dones (two at home, road game as a 7 point favorite) and 3 missed playoffs while having a hall-of-fame quarterback is underachieving. The Super Bowl run in 2008 just does not make up for those missed opportunities in my opinion. Especially now that we're 6 years removed from it.

If you disagree and like his resume of three underachieving season for every one great season then you will like the move.

Hopefully we get that ONE great season once in the next 4 he's now under contract. Because I think we have three clunkers coming.

I'm not busting your chops here. But what I really don't understand about this is why they would do a thorough coaching search to find 2-3 candidates with similar coaching ability to Tomlin when they already HAVE Tomlin. Now, if performing such a search was going to guarantee them 2-3 candidates that were definitely better than Tomlin, sure, why not. But without that guarantee, I'd prefer that they stick to their cautious, stable ways. Change for the sake of change rarely comes w/out upheaval and often times that upheaval is not of the positive variety.

 

[slashsteel]

for me it wasn't necessarily replacing Tomlin, but perhaps making him sweat a little longer

especially with the schedule being difficult this year

 

[stillwright]

They were the team's runs on the backs of players Tomlin never selected or choose. He did it with a coaching staff in place when he arrived.

As far as I can tell, he turned the lights off, pushed the play button on the Phil Collins tape and thought he was coaching.

And the question really is, what are the chances we DO WORSE if we fire him vs. the chances we can do BETTER.

Everyone defending the move seems to think the next guy coming through the door will be so much worse. My point is actually Tomlin's not that hard to find someone similar in ability and the organization naturally props him up and covers his weaknesses. Advantages any coach brought in would gain as well.

I think a thorough coaching search would yield at LEAST 2-3 candidates similar in coaching ability to Tomlin and likely better.

But this ownership group will always err on the side of caution when it comes to coaching changes in the name of stability.

The question really debated here isn't about Tomlin, but his track record.

If you think he's overachieved over his 8 seasons here, then you like the move (and the only logical way to come to that conclusion is to GREATLY weigh the Super Bowl run vs. his year-to-year consistency).

I think he's underachieved. I think 3 one-and-dones (two at home, road game as a 7 point favorite) and 3 missed playoffs while having a hall-of-fame quarterback is underachieving. The Super Bowl run in 2008 just does not make up for those missed opportunities in my opinion. Especially now that we're 6 years removed from it.

If you disagree and like his resume of three underachieving season for every one great season then you will like the move.

Hopefully we get that ONE great season once in the next 4 he's now under contract. Because I think we have three clunkers coming.

So they could find 2 or 3 coaches that are similar and might be better.....heck. I wonder why the Rooney's didn'the jump at that. Start over entirely with a new HC. Do we we keep our OC and DC's ? Or do we allow this similar coach to bring his own guys in?. Lots of possibilities here.

 

[Gareth]

for me it wasn't necessarily replacing Tomlin, but perhaps making him sweat a little longer

especially with the schedule being difficult this year

This.

Him re-signing was pretty much a given.

I would have liked him to feel a little heat and see what happened for the year.

 

[Steelerfan81]

Great hire. He should do well replacing Cowher .. you knownow that all HIS players are gone.

<\ half the board>

 

[deljzc]

I never said, in any off-season to date, that would fire Mike Tomlin.

But I have said I would NEVER have given him an extension with 2-years left on his deal based on his last 4 seasons.

The only real change I've endorsed or would have strongly recommended was to fire Colbert after the 2013 season (second straight 8-8 season). I recommended that because I don't know exactly what Tomlin brings to the table and I wanted a fresh set of eyes to evaluate his job performance. We've talked about this ad nauseum, but I don't think Art Rooney nearly has his finger on the pulse of this franchise like Dan Rooney did. To me there is just too much Colbert/Tomlin running the show for my liking.

But then we have the sort of typical happy Rooney season (11-5 and a first round home loss in the playoffs) that this organization loves to endorse as "above the line" and they just won't change things under those circumstances.

I'm just not a fan of the extension now and wanted to wait and see on this season.

And I have no problem stating I think Tomlin has been pretty much average since he's been here (if you take all the underachievements vs. the over achievements).

 

[antdrewjosh]

Tomlin, Steelers a perfect match
Posted 8 hours ago
Bob Labriola
Steelers.com
@BobLabriola
Mike Tomlin accepts and understands how the Steelers do business, and he's good at his job.

To him, it’s no big deal. Nothing to celebrate. In fact, the task of even getting Mike Tomlin to talk about the contract extension he signed today, at least in an expansive manner, has a degree of difficulty falling somewhere between pulling teeth and impossible. But the fact the Steelers and their coach executed a two-year extension through the 2018 season, and did so without any leaks during the negotiation process, makes a statement.

From Steelers President Art Rooney II, it’s an acknowledgement of Tomlin’s success at problem-solving, because at the core of being a successful head coach is an ability to solve problems. From Tomlin, it’s an acceptance of the way the Steelers do business, because working for the Pittsburgh Steelers is different. And because it all happened under the radar is just one of the reasons they belong together.


VIEW GALLERY | 10 Photos
Top Ten Coach Mike Tomlin
Hired in 2007 following a rather meteoric rise through the list of candidates after his first interview, Tomlin has been faced with a series of problems that always didn’t appear on the surface to be problems and yet could’ve morphed into big problems if he hadn’t handled them well.

Start with one of the first situations he encountered, back in early January 2007: What to do about the defense he was to inherit, a 3-4 zone-blitz scheme coordinated by Dick LeBeau?

3-4 VS. 4-3
Brought to the professional ranks by Tony Dungy in 2001 and schooled in the art of NFL defense by Monte Kiffin, Tomlin began as a young secondary coach being fed a steady diet of the Tampa-2. Then hired by Brad Childress to coordinate the Minnesota Vikings defense in 2006, Tomlin’s unit there also was a base 4-3. That was his hands-on experience when the Steelers first contacted him about the job opened by Bill Cowher’s resignation.

Tomlin came to the Steelers and kept the defense that was in place. The entire defensive coaching staff was retained, with LeBeau firmly in charge of the unit’s direction and approach, and the personnel moves made – most notably the insertion of James Harrison into the starting lineup and using the top two draft picks on Lawrence Timmons and LaMarr Woodley – were ones designed to make the defense better at doing what it had been doing before Tomlin’s arrival. And before dismissing this move as the ultimate no-brainer, understand that other finalists for the Steelers job weren’t going to retain LeBeau or the scheme.

“To me, that’s all ego-driven when people come in and believe they have to put their stamp on things. Why would you fix something that’s not broken?” said Tomlin some time later. “That’s just me. I’m more interested in winning than anything else, and that allows us to win. We have great players, we have a great system, we have great coaches. That decision was very easy for me. The story doesn’t have to be me, what I do. The story has to be what we do, and what we’re capable of doing as a team.”

There have been but three coaches at the helm for the Steelers since 1969, and each man came to be known for one of the lessons he always taught. Chuck Noll’s “whatever it takes” let everyone know there now was the singular commitment to winning that had been lacking during the franchise’s first 36 seasons. Bill Cowher’s “re-establish the mind-set” was a nod to his belief that a core component of winning football was accepting the notion it first and foremost is a physical, hard-hitting sport. For Tomlin, it’s “the standard is the standard.”

THE STANDARD IS THE STANDARD
The playing field is much more level in today’s NFL, with fewer teams consistently behind the curve in personnel evaluation serving to create rampant parity. In a league where player-for-player trades are difficult because schemes are different, where there’s a salary cap, where there’s almost a 50 percent change in playoff participants from one season to the next, an acceptance that injuries are inevitable and then developing the mind-set to compensate for them is a critical component of winning football in the 2010s.

“I don’t convince them, the guys who step up and play for the guys who go down convince them,” Tomlin has explained. “There are some guys who have been around this football team since I’ve been here and heard me say that and have had tangible evidence of that. The more often that happens, the more they see guys are capable of stepping up and delivering and delivering big, it adds value to those words.

“And it’s not something I’m trying to convince them of. It’s something I believe in. These guys are professional athletes, and in the big scheme of things they’re in the minute upper percentile of people who do what it is that they do. So what difference does it make if a guy is a front-line guy or a starter-in-waiting. They’re all capable men, capable of playing above the line and providing winning ball for us. That’s something we talk about openly. Everyone wants a disclaimer. Everyone wants to grade on the curve. We don’t live in that world. That’s one of the things about sport in general that I love. It’s black-and-white, either you do it or you don’t. You’re successful or you’re not. You win or you lose. I try to keep it as close to that as I can in everything that we do.”

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REPLAYHead coach Mike Tomlin by the numbers
A criticism sometimes leveled at Tomlin is that he won Super Bowl XLIII with players he inherited, but if you’re in the football business isn’t that actually praiseworthy? A coach came to a team that had assembled a quality batch of talent, including a quarterback on a path to greatness, and he largely stayed the course while making some complementary improvements to what was in place. In his second year, there was a parade in Downtown Pittsburgh in February, and by the end of his fourth they had won a second AFC Championship Game at Heinz Field.

It was a nice run, a run that’s often underappreciated, but thankfully not by the guy signing Tomlin’s checks. Since Super Bowl XLV, the Steelers have transitioned from a team that had gotten old and stale on defense – there were seven thirtysomething starters in 2011 and six in 2012 – to one where William Gay is the only starter on defense to have seen a 30th birthday. There was a lot of problem-solving associated with re-making a veteran roster that had experienced a lot of success together, and the Steelers completed the four-year transition without a single losing season while winning a division championship in 2014. Looking ahead, their prospects for 2015 seem bright if for no other reason than their quarterback has covered a lot of ground on that path to greatness he was traveling back in 2007.

Tomlin deserves credit for the team remaining competitive through a transition that included a dozen significant players having their careers here end along with the normal roster turnover every NFL team experiences annually. And he deserves credit as well for working within the Steelers’ framework to get through that phase.

The Steelers’ framework is one where nobody gets to make every football decision every time. Through the hirings and the firings, the drafting, when and if to sign players to extensions, a Steelers head coach is not a dictator. Chuck Noll wasn’t. Bill Cowher wasn’t. Mike Tomlin isn’t, and by accepting the Steelers’ framework he proves he truly embraces the team-first philosophy at the root of a 45-season run of success that has included more wins (448) and more division championships (20) than any other NFL franchise since the 1970 merger. When Tomlin had said, “The story doesn’t have to be me, what I do. The story has to be what we do, and what we’re capable of doing as a team,” he meant it.

ORGANIZATIONAL DECISIONS
Over the past few years, there had to be changes. Some of them difficult. Some involving people who had contributed a lot to the franchise, people who have their names inscribed on a couple of those six Lombardis. Those are examples of organizational decisions, and with the Steelers those result after input is sought and considered. But also with the Steelers comes the expectation that after a decision is reached, then everybody rows the boat in one direction.

That’s the way the Steelers do business today, and Tomlin is perfect as their head coach because he understands that being in charge isn’t as important as being supported.