There is joy in Sharpsburg, the “yinzers” have hit the mother lode of football coaches, they have finally landed the coach that they have desired and could identify with for 20 years.
There was no immediate outrage when Mike McCarthy was hired to replace a head coach with a 19-year winning record, Mike Tomlin. There were no false stories written that another candidate was hired to coach the Steelers a day before McCarthy was scheduled to take the helm of the team.
There were no park benches with first-grade racial epithets hastily scribbled across them with magic markers filled with ink made from the blood, sweat and tears of others before them in an almost neanderthal form of cursive, cursing a young man who wasn’t provided an opportunity to do a job.
Put it this way. When someone goes to a restaurant for the first time, usually after the waitress or waiter brings a glass of water or a beverage and provides a copy of the menu, people place their order and generally don’t judge a menu or a dish before they have had an opportunity to taste it.
If Mike Tomlin had been hired as a chef of a restaurant, the establishment based on reviews and critique of those who had never even tasted the food would have been closed hours after it opened.
Here is what Mark Madden wrote after Mike Tomlin’s departure from the Steelers: “You know what I think we’re going to realize this year? That Tomlin was an awful coach and had an awful staff. I think the difference in seeing how the coaches operate already, and I think this is going to be a much more buttoned-up team. I think it’s going to be so readily evident and right away.”
Even after the tenure of Mike Tomlin ended, there were and are folks that refuse to leave the “hoods” in the attic. Mark Madden wrote this gem after Mike Tomlin was hired by NBC Sports. “I saw just enough of Mike Tomlin’s network TV debut to know he’d be perceived as very good and to know I wasn’t interested. That last part isn’t meant to insult. No network sports analyst has been must-see TV since Howard Cosell left ‘Monday Night Football’ after the 1983 season. (Though Dennis Miller and Tony Kornheiser were intriguing in the same role. Anybody but the jockocracy.) Two things about Tomlin’s NBC launch at Thursday night’s Pro Football Hall of Fame game were telling: Tomlin turned a great phrase when stumping for Hines Ward’s Hall of Fame candidacy: ‘This guy was predator, not prey.’ Vintage Tomlin: Something catchy in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. (Ward still won’t ever get into Canton.) Tomlin pointedly didn’t talk about Carolina Panthers quarterback Kenny Pickett, who played Thursday night. Tomlin took Pickett for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft. But Tomlin isn’t going to rehash his own awful, franchise-damaging decision. Nor did he want to lambaste Pickett, a prototypical first-round bust. Nobody on NBC’s broadcast was more qualified to discuss Pickett. But Tomlin didn’t.”
Mark, why would Mike Tomlin or any other head coach spend time discussing the putrid and failed experiment of a narcissistic and overvalued first round draft pick? Many Steelers and University of Pittsburgh football fans did everything but camp out on Mike Tomlin’s doorstep brandishing “Pickett’s life matters” signs trying and almost dying to ensure that the Steelers drafted him. Check out how many talented quarterbacks remained on the NFL draft board when Kenny Pickett was drafted in the first round of the 2022 NFL Draft. What a waste.
I am also going to bombard and pollute your eardrums with more of this “mad dog Madden” nonsense. Mark Madden also wrote and said on occasion that Mike Tomlin was not a disciplinarian or something amounting to that. He wrote: “Tomlin was an awful coach and had an awful staff. I think the difference is in seeing how the coaches operate already, and I think this is going to be a much more buttoned-up team.”
“An awful coach…” Why doesn’t Madden get more mileage out of his narrative by sponsoring a WWE event on the Mar-a-Lago lawn? Oh, I forgot, that has already happened in the Steelers locker room, more than 26 years ago. Madden very seldom or maybe not ever has mentioned the brawl that occurred in the Pittsburgh Steelers locker room during the “reign of the jaw.”
Ed Bouchette wrote and posted an article on The Athletic website on June 10, 2019: “It was like the WWF:” “Steelers’ ‘Minicamp Melee’ reverberated for years.”
Bouchette recalled the following: “One of the strangest scenes I ever witnessed in sports broke out after the final Steelers minicamp practice ever at Three Rivers Stadium. It occurred inside their locker room on June 7, 2000. It began in the open when linebacker Earl Holmes and halfback Richard Huntley threw punches at each other in what seemed to be a typical practice skirmish. Afterward, three writers asked Huntley, as he sat in front of his locker, what happened on the field between him and Holmes. Just after Huntley (5-foot-11, 225 pounds) said it was over and done with, Holmes (6-2, 242 pounds) burst through the reporters and screamed at Huntley, pointed his finger at him and said, ‘You want a piece of Big E?’ Holmes menacingly picked up a wooden stool. Huntley hollered, ‘Put the chair down and come get some.’
This was the locker room of the iron-jawed, spittoon-loving, look-you-straight-in-the-eye coach Bill Cowher, although at the height of the melee, according to eyewitness accounts, Cowher may have had a minimum effect in breaking up the rumble. Bouchette also said that: “His team’s locker room fight could not have come at a worse time for Bill Cowher, who was at the lowest point of his coaching career. After the Steelers made the playoffs in each of his first six seasons as coach, they tumbled to 7-9 in 1998 and 6-10 in 1999. And now this during their first spring practices for the next season?”
Mike Tomlin left the Steelers with a winning record! Imagine if the Steelers had a record of 7-9 in 1998 and 6-10 in 1999, and followed that up with a chair swinging WWE cage-like brawl in 2000? I doubt very much if his tenure would have lasted 19 years. Hell, currently a few folks are vigorously trying to get him fired as a football analyst from NBC and he was just hired. They want to get rid of him, just…because.