Quarterback Aaron Rodgers mostly refused to discuss his potential NFL future or whether he would be back with the Pittsburgh Steelers next season after the team’s playoff loss to the Houston Texans. But Rodgers made one thing clear — the Steelers should want head coach Mike Tomlin to return.
As he did throughout the end of the regular season, Rodgers defended Tomlin after the head coach suffered his seventh consecutive postseason defeat Monday night.
“This league has changed a lot in my 21 years. You know, when you hear conversations about the Mike Tomlins of the world, Matt LaFleurs of the world, those are just two that I’ve played for,” Rodgers told reporters. “When I first got in the league, there wouldn’t be conversations about whether those guys were on the hot seat.
“But the way that the league is covered now and the way that there’s snap decisions and the validity given to the Twitter experts and all the experts on TB now who make it seem like they know what the hell they’re talking about.
“To me, that’s an absolute joke.”
Tomlin has never sustained a losing season in 19 seasons as Pittsburgh’s head coach. In Week 18, he tied Chuck Noll’s franchise record with 193 regular season wins.
The postseason, though, has been a different story lately. That’s why Tomlin potentially faces an uncertain future.
With Monday’s 30-6 defeat, Tomlin fell to 8-12 in the postseason. Over 19 years, he has won a playoff game in only four seasons.
Aaron Rodgers Sounds Off on Mike Tomlin Critics Again
Rodgers kept a lot of his early answers to reporters after the blowout playoff loss to the Texans short. But he opened up when discussing Tomlin’s job and the NFL head coaching cycle at large.
“For either [Tomlin or LaFleur] to be on the hot seat is really apropos of where we’re at as a society and as a league because, obviously, Matt has done a lot of great things in Green Bay, and we had a lot of success,” Rodgers continued. “Mike T. has had more success than damn near anybody in the league for the last 19, 20 years.
“More than that, though, when you have the right guy, and the culture is right, you don’t think about making a change.
“But there’s a lot of pressure that comes from the outside, and obviously, that sways decisions from time to time. But that’s not how I would do things and now how the league used to be.”
Rodgers’s comment is very timely. NFL teams firing or potentially moving on from head coaches who have won a lot of games has already dominated the offseason. It appears Rodgers sees it as a new trend.
Social media and the need for instant gratification in the 21st Century are easy things to blame.
Tomlin’s Resume With Steelers
Rodgers’s overall tone of his message on Tomlin was on point. But critics won’t have a hard time pushing back.
Other head coaches who experienced great success in the regular season have lost their jobs because of postseason failures. Furthermore, there are examples of this that date back further than Rodgers.
The best example as it relates to Tomlin happened in Rodgers’s second season. After 2006, the then San Diego Chargers fired head coach Marty Schottenheimer. A Canonsburg, PA native, Schottenheimer had 200 career regular season wins and was coming off a 14-2 record at the time.
But he never coached again after losing following a bye in the January 2007 playoffs.
The Chargers haven’t won 14 games again since firing Schottenheimer. Maybe Schottenheimer would have finally broken through with a trip to the Super Bowl with a young Philip Rivers.
But after the January 2007 playoff disappointment, Schottenheimer finished his career with a 5-13 postseason record.
Is Tomlin the modern-day Schottenheimer but with a Super Bowl title?
Despite a .602 win percentage from 1994-2006, Schottenheimer didn’t win a playoff game over his final 11 seasons.
Tomlin owns a .611 win percentage since the start of the 2017 season. After Monday, he’s now gone the past nine seasons without a postseason victory.
Aaron Rodgers Fires Strong Message on the Steelers’ Future