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Aubrey Bruce

Mike Tomlin is a coach for the ages

 

When the Head Coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers Football Club, Michael Pettaway Tomlin, became the first head coach in the history of the National Football League to go 16 seasons without a losing season, lo and behold, suddenly it seemed as if many of the writers located inside and outside of the Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania market experienced an epiphany. Many folks received this divine revelation as they focused their “telescopes of discovery” on coaching candidates residing on planets located in galaxies far, far away. During the galactic explorations of most of those scribes, almost all of them reluctantly came to the realization that the simple fact–Mike Tomlin can coach, period. Most of them have searched for decades looking for a coach that they felt worthy enough and qualified enough to patrol the hallowed halls and sidelines of the Black and Gold.

 

“Hey, Mike Tomlin was way too young and far too Black to hold such a lofty position in the halls of Steeler lore and history.”

 

 

 

 

 

The only person that didn’t hold that opinion was the late Dan Rooney. The Steelers morphed into greatness, not because of Chuck Noll, Bill Nunn Jr. Bill Cowher, Mike Tomlin, or any other player, coach, or administrator. My father, Oprah Elliott Bruce, once said: “In this one life that we have on this earth, we either evolve or we dissolve, there is no gray area.”

 

Bob Dylan’s viewpoint was, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

 

The vision of Dan Rooney provided assurances that he would not permit the football club founded by his father, the late Art Rooney Sr., to dissolve and perish but rather to use the fertilizer of losing and incompetence to plant and nurture the seeds and trees and harvest the fruit from the Pittsburgh Steelers’ “grove of greatness.” Mike Tomlin has succeeded because his success was being nurtured before he even realized that the seeds had even been planted.

 

When Tomlin ascended to the upper echelons of the Pittsburgh Steelers hierarchy, that stage was already set. He wasn’t taught to lie, cheat, and steal to create and display false standards of excellence. The only tenets that were acceptable to his employer were honesty, integrity, and finally, loyalty. Dan Rooney would not be asked to stand in the gap for Mike Tomlin if Tomlin practiced and was convicted of using illegal methods to cheat and undermine the rules of fair and equal play just to gain an edge over the competition.   Even when Bill “Belicheat” was exposed cheating by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Goodell end up fining Bill Belichick a measly and mealy-mouthed $500,000 and the Patriots organization $250,000 and stripped the club of its 2008 first-round draft pick. However, fast forward. Mike Tomlin was fined $100,000 for allegedly interfering with a kickoff return at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on November 28, 2013, during a primetime Thanksgiving Day game. “Belicheat” was fined $500,000 for seven years of skullduggery. Yet, Tomlin’s act took less than 10 seconds. There is no way in hell that the $500,000 penalty for “Spygate” could even remotely be considered fair when compared to levying a $100,000 fine for a two-second violation of tripping a player. Mike Tomlin wasn’t watching film and strategically placing videographers at different positions to steal signals of the opposition just to give him insight into the perfect time and field position to trip the Ravens kick returner Jacoby Jones.

 

Another albatross placed upon the shoulders of Tomlin is, he is too much of a player’s coach and because of that connection to the players, he loses control of the locker room at the drop of a hat. Let’s revisit another lack of control and discipline issue in the Steelers locker room echoing from the past. During a less-than-stellar period during the journey of the Black and Gold, there was a time that the greatness of the Steelers might have taken a short hiatus. That time could’ve occurred shortly before the Steelers 2000 season on June 7, 2000.  Former Steelers head coach Bill Cowher was still the “Big Man On Campus” when a wild fight broke out in the Steelers locker room. In a 2019 article for The Atlantic, former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sportswriter Ed Bouchette recalled the incident this way.

 

“Earl Holmes and Richard Huntley engaged in a heated fight on the practice field. Three writers asked Huntley what happened on the field between him and Holmes,” Bouchette wrote. “Huntley said it was over and done. Holmes burst through the reporters and screamed at Huntley, ‘You want a piece of Big E?’ Holmes then picked up a wooden stool. Huntley hollered, ‘Put the chair down and come get some.’ That is when all hell broke loose. Other players joined the fray, some trying to break it up, others to get involved. The moment linebacker Jason Gildon picked up his wooden chair and began swinging it around the locker room, I scooted to a safer place. That brawl spread all over the locker room.”

 

Where was the discipline of the spit-shining, whip-carrying Bill Cowher when there was “blood on the Steelers dance floor” on June 7, 2000? Did the stern-faced, granite-jawed Bill Cowher have to seek refuge for himself? Where were the ear-splitting calls for discipline then? Well, nobody is saying.

 

Have there been any locker room-clearing brawls during the tenure of Mike Tomlin? As Homey the Clown would say, “I don’t think so, Homey don’t play that.”

 

People keep saying, “We fall down but we get up.” Mike Tomlin doesn’t have to worry about getting up because he is not falling.