Mueller: It's time for Steelers, Tomlin to part ways

Calling for the Steelers to fire Mike Tomlin is, in some ways, a fool’s errand. They won’t do it. “Coaching stability” is more a part of their organizational DNA than championship football, at this point. Art Rooney II would never be swayed by any words written in this column, but they need to be written nonetheless.

It’s time. These next four games should be the last ones he coaches for the Steelers. They can work out a trade for him if they want, and take advantage of all the teams that would supposedly fire their coaches in a heartbeat to get Tomlin under contract.

I say this as a card-carrying member of the Mike Tomlin Society of Supporters and Sometime Apologists. I think he was a very good coach here for a long time, far better than he was given credit for locally. But he hasn’t been a very good coach here for at least a few years now, dating back to the end of the Ben Roethlisberger era.

Thursday night’s 21-18 loss to the 2-10 New England Patriots, the second time in four days Tomlin’s Steelers were defeated at home by a 2-10 opponent, drove home that point in resounding fashion.

The Patriots were coming off a shutout loss at home, and had scored 13 points in their previous three games. They had topped 20 points once all season. The score was 21-3 halfway through the second quarter. Days after getting torched by Arizona tight end Trey McBride, Tomlin’s defense was shredded by New England’s Hunter Henry, for whom they had no answer until the second half.

Oh, and Bailey Zappe was doing the passing. And did he ever pass, to the tune of 14-for-21, 196 yards and 3 touchdowns in the first 30 minutes. That the Steelers shut him and New England out in the second half hardly matters; the damage was more than done.

Another lowlight, before I forget: With this loss, the Steelers became the first over .500 team in NFL history to lose back-to-back games to a pair of teams that were both at least eight games under .500.

Anyway, back to Tomlin. It might seem a little unfair to pin all of this on him when Mitch Trubisky was as bad as he was, and when other facets of the offense failed, but the effects of bad coaching were on display throughout the night.

There was Trubisky burning a timeout early in the second half because he was completely unaware of the play clock. Tomlin spent another one because he couldn’t decide if he wanted to go for it on fourth and inches from his own 29-yard line; had he been more decisive, he could have saved the timeout – all the Steelers did was run a sneak. They punted three plays later, by the way.

How about the completely inane play calls with the game hanging in the balance? Facing third-and-two with the two-minute warning looming as a de facto timeout, the Steelers threw incomplete on third down, and then threw a go-ball to George Pic—haha, just kidding, they threw one to Diontae Johnson that was never close to being completed. It was the wrong play, to the wrong person, at the wrong time. Pickens had 5 catches for 19 yards and was barely utilized all night, in case you were wondering.

The offensive play-calling was mind-numbing and unimaginative for almost the entirety of the first half, and while Trubisky certainly deserves blame for missed opportunities, his coaches didn’t bathe themselves in glory, either.

I won’t blame Tomlin for going for it on fourth-and-two down 21-10, for the record. That was the right move by the numbers, but once again on a critical possession down, as he likes to say, the Steelers didn’t have anything good dialed up.

I could go on talking about all the shortcomings in this game, or how wretched a two-game stretch this has been, and how it sure looks like it has the potential to get worse, but the big picture is what’s more important here.

Where does the current trajectory lead? What’s this all building towards? This franchise does not have a capable quarterback on the roster. Tomlin is a major reason the Steelers chose Kenny Pickett. They have arguably the worst offensive coaching staff in the league. Tomlin hired them. They play an outdated style that requires an enormous amount of work by the defense game-in, game-out, while being conservative to a fault on offense. That’s Tomlin’s philosophy.

This franchise is hurtling towards its seventh-straight season without a playoff win. Only two other coaches since the merger have gone that long in one place without a postseason victory: Marvin Lewis in Cincinnati, and Jim Mora in New Orleans. Tomlin is about to join them. He might even do it in style, with his first-ever losing season. I see maybe one win left on the schedule, and that’s being generous.

I don’t see things getting better under Tomlin, do you? Will there suddenly be a sea change, where he radically overhauls his coaching staff, finds a new quarterback, and brings the team’s offensive philosophy up to date with the league’s upper echelon? Rooney fired Matt Canada; left to his own devices, Tomlin wouldn’t have even done that.

No, what we’ll get instead are the same banal platitudes we always get. The same stale messaging that his players are tuning out.

After the game, Tomlin was asked why he had confidence that the team could bounce back after these two losses. His response?

“This is what we do. This is who we are.”

This is indeed who the Steelers are, or at least what they’ve become under Mike Tomlin.

And that’s the problem.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Mueller: It's time for Steelers, Tomlin to part ways