Mike Tomlin Still Has His Head in the Game

This past January, after stepping down as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Mike Tomlin found himself in possession of something rare: free time. He hadn’t enjoyed its luxuries in 19 seasons, a tenure more than four times as long as the average NFL head coach. So what would a man who lived and breathed football for the better part of his adult life do now?

For the first time since 1997, Tomlin could attend his annual family reunion, which typically conflicted with Steelers training camp. He cheered on his daughter at every single one of her gymnastics meets, home or away. He went to Augusta for the Masters, New York for the US Open, Miami for the Grand Prix. And, when he had a moment alone with the PlayStation his sons left behind after going off to college, he put the finishing touches on his Minecraft city, a virtual sprawl of ritzy high-rises and ambitiously situated aquariums Tomlin had been building over the previous decade with the steady and unglamorous accumulation of digital concrete powder.

When I asked to interview him, I hadn’t planned to talk about video games, or even considered the possibility that Tomlin, Super Bowl champion and hard-boiled leader of men, had been privately nursing an obsession with “rooftop penthouses” and socially conscious architecture. But a few days before we met, the 54-year-old uploaded a video to YouTube revealing that playing Minecraft had helped him “detach from the pressures” of his unusually unforgiving job. “I apologize for my lack of stick control,” said Coach T in his 20-minute virtual tour, adopting a cadence no less presidential than the one he often used in his famously quotable and occasionally obtuse press conferences.

Of course, the news that football’s foremost hard-ass was a closet miner delighted the internet. Within hours, someone had charted the splits on the Steelers’ playoff record before and after Tomlin started gaming, suggesting that perhaps he’d have won a second championship had he not been so preoccupied. Across the timeline, memes were abundant. But when we met earlier this month, in a millennial grey midtown conference room that bore a striking resemblance to the “multipurpose spaces” of which Tomlin is evidently so fond, he encouraged me not to read too much into it.

“I am probably on the spectrum,” he announced. “My wife would say that.”

Tomlin, unshackled from the burdens of coaching one of the NFL’s most storied franchises, is relishing the opportunity to reintroduce himself. Being the boss, he told me, had been isolating, and from his time as an assistant to Jon Gruden in Tampa Bay he’d learned to leave his credit card and let the guys have their fun. “There's a certain loneliness socially that comes with the job,” he reflects. “If you’re going to be an effective leader, you’ve got to be comfortable with that.”

His decision to step down, then, was not especially painful or protracted, coming just 24 hours after the Steelers’ 30-6 loss to the Houston Texans in the opening round of the playoffs last January, during which chants of “Fire Tomlin” could be heard from aggrieved fans. But he disputes the notion that his departure had anything to do with a nine-year playoff win drought and an increasingly cranky fan base. “I’m just a realist, and there’s a shelf life for everything, my tenure included,” he insists. “I’d rather leave early than stay too long.”

If his abrupt departure marked the end of an era in Pittsburgh, it was less surprising that NBC had a chair waiting for him on its Sunday Night Football broadcast. Tomlin, after all, speaks in zen koans and zingers, some inscrutable and others sneakily profound. “The standard is the standard” goes one of his favorite proverbs. He also once observed that “there’s a fine line between drinking wine and stomping grapes.” And in January, when a reporter asked a hypothetical question after Pittsburgh's division-clinching Week 18 win against the Baltimore Ravens, he countered with a now-legendary Tomlinism: “If my aunt had male parts, she'd be my uncle.”

None of this is a performance, says his friend Sean McDermott, who played football with Tomlin at William & Mary and coached the Buffalo Bills until this past January. “The wordsmithing that he does, people think he spends a lot of time thinking those things up,” McDermott told me. “But I can tell you and them that he was like that in college.”

Now that Tomlin is with NBC, where he joins a long lineage of coaches-turned-analysts, he’s watching football differently. With the volume on, for the first time ever, and with a fresh perspective on his old team. The night before we spoke, the Steelers lost ugly to the Cleveland Browns. Trailing 21-10, Steelers All-Pro edge rusher T.J. Watt put on a headset and let his defensive coordinator have it. Later on, when Steelers QB Aaron Rodgers appeared to berate coach Mike McCarthy, it was hard to imagine even Rodgers would’ve had the gonads to pull a stunt like that with Tomlin. But Coach T, as his players called him, has little to say about the state of affairs in the Steel City; he’s a process guy, and he’s no longer privy to their process.

“There’s always tense moments in big business,” Tomlin says, somewhat suggestively, of his relationship with Rodgers, with whom he overlapped in Pittsburgh for one season. “And football business is no different than Fortune 500 companies, man.”

The demands of football business—of coaching and scouting and scheming for two decades, without interruption, in a city that takes its pigskin very seriously—had forced Tomlin to retreat inward, concealing parts of himself that contravened his imperious public image. “They don’t want to know that you’re a human,” he told me. “They want you to be a flat character.” So that was what he became: Mr. Football, the Provost of Pittsburgh, one of the few coaches in league history who can say he never once had a losing season. (Remember: “the standard is the standard.”) But sacrifices were made: he missed those gymnastics meets, and too many of his sons’ Mayce and Dino’s own football games. “There’s certainly a price to pay when you coach in the NFL,” laments Tomlin, allowing a trace of sorrow to creep into his typically commanding baritone. “I paid it for a long time.”

Over the course of his NFL tenure, Tomlin was often called a “player’s coach,” that designation reserved for coaches who might not call the offense or defense but have a way of getting the most out of their players. To Tomlin, the winningest Black coach in league history, that label once felt reductive, even a little coded, as if to suggest he didn’t know his X’s and O’s. “I viewed it as people wanting to put me in a box or questioning my strategic or schematic approach,” he says. “So certainly it was a trigger early on in my career simply because I didn’t want to be summarized.”

On NBC, where Tomlin now hosts Football Night in America (along with Jason Garrett, Devin McCourty, and Maria Taylor), he appears lighter, less cagey, excitedly pulling from his deep well of football insight while offering brutal assessments of the Eagles’ kick return coverage (bad) or the Commanders’ late-game clock management (“disgusting,” Coach T groaned this past Sunday). It’s a side of Tomlin—effusive, besuited, refreshingly impolitic—those outside the Steelers facility haven’t had the opportunity to see—even Taylor, his NBC co-host. “When I covered him as a coach, he was always doing this mental calculus that caused him to have a hard exterior,” she told me. “Now his job is to be Mike Tomlin and talk about the thing that he knows the most about, which is football.”

When watching Tomlin on television, where he doesn’t mince words like so many other rookie analysts, former Steelers All-Pro wide receiver Hines Ward recognizes something of his old coach. Ward already had nine seasons with the team under his belt when a then-35-year-old, little-known Tomlin was hired. Previously, veterans had been permitted to wear gear from their respective alma maters during team walkthroughs. “But Mike T wanted to do it his way,” Ward remembers. So when the receiver jogged out to practice in his Georgia Bulldogs shorts, he and the rest of the team’s veterans were sent back into the locker room to change. “He wanted to make sure everybody had team-issued stuff on, that we were all uniformed and looked the same,” says Ward, noting that some of the Steelers journeymen didn’t immediately take kindly to the rookie coach’s decrees—but were eventually won over. “That’s what you respected about Mike in year one. He didn’t waver, and everybody fell in line.”

But Tomlin could be warm, too, and fiercely paternal. Among the most gruesome moments in recent football history was the spinal cord injury suffered by Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier in a 2017 game against the Cincinnati Bengals. After a head-first collision with a Bengals receiver, Shazier collapsed on the field, instantly losing movement and feeling in his lower body. After emergency surgery, doctors gave the Pro Bowl linebacker a 20 percent chance of walking again. Despite these long odds, Shazier spent the next year of his life exhaustively rehabbing his back in the hopes of one day returning to the field. What he remembers most of that time, he told me, is Tomlin’s mentorship: at 5 a.m. most mornings, the coach held private film study with Shazier, and every Friday afternoon after practice he’d pay him a visit at the rehab facility, offering the linebacker spiritual guidance and encouraging Tomlinisms. It was the “toughest year of my life,” remembers Shazier, who never played another snap of football and now serves as the Steelers’ alumni relations assistant. “But he was like a superhero to me.”

At some point in my conversation with Tomlin, I felt compelled to level with him and confess, as one might to a priest, that I’m from Baltimore, where residents might find more colorful ways of describing Tomlin than superhero. Tormenter, perhaps, or the cheat who tripped Jacoby Jones with a shit-eating grin on his face. Indeed, many of us Ravens fans are still licking our wounds from a number of demoralizing defeats at the hands of Tomlin, who squared off against recently departed Ravens coach John Harbaugh 44 times over his 19 seasons, the second-most match-ups between any two coaches in NFL history. No small number of those games caused me deep anguish: the 2008 AFC Championship defeat, after which I cried in my father’s arms, according to family lore, or the Week 18 loss this past January, by which point I had long reconciled with the simple fact that teams coached by Mike Tomlin have a tendency to win games they’re not supposed to.

“Well, winning is the business,” he offered me in consolation. “I like to keep the lights on.”

Through the first five weeks of the 2026-27 NFL season, however, teams have found new and progressively confounding ways to lose, often by committing the kinds of careless mistakes Tomlin mostly avoided. On Sunday evenings, it’s not unusual to go online and find fans across the league calling for Tomlin to come out of retirement and rescue their cursed franchises. Fox Sports’ Jay Glazer reported back in January that as many as seven teams inquired about Tomlin’s availability when he first announced his retirement earlier this year.

On the topic of a potential return to the league, Tomlin is evasive, though any number of teams would pay him an astronomical amount of money to shepherd them out of the football wilderness, staff in hand. But the past nine months, he maintains, have been about committing himself to other pursuits, like broadcast television and pixelated architectural feats. Besides, Tomlin says, he’s “probably watching more football” than ever—just behind a desk, in a new city every Sunday night. And now, he has plenty of time to practice his stick control.