Actually, one of the biggest criticisms of him is that he overperformed with bad teams.
The NFL has a draft system where the worst team in the league gets the best pick in the next year's draft.
Tomlin dragging teams that should have won 2 or 3 games into the playoffs each year just to lose immediately meant that the Steelers never got any good draft picks and thus never improved the team year of year.
I don’t think this criticism matches reality though. The Packers did not bottom out to get Aaron Rodgers; the Patriots did not bottom out to get Tom Brady. The Browns did bottom out to get Baker Mayfield; how’d that go?
In fact there are way more examples of bad teams crashing into high picks, and then continuing to crash, than dramatic turn-arounds into Super Bowl victories shortly thereafter.
Good teams and coaches go for the Super Bowl every year because it is impossible to predict when you’ll get there and win. That includes when you have (or don’t have) a great quarterback. You just have to try your hardest every year and hope.
And excellence is a habit, not a dial you can quickly turn from one side to the other over the summer. Most players have short careers and so a team needs them to get better every year in order to hope to peak as a team.
It seems to me like a lot of sports criticism is based in regretful retrospection. “Oh, if only they’d done this or that, they would have won.” But it’s impossible to know what would have happened. Injuries alone are unpredictable and hugely impactful from year to year.
It’s a natural thought, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to actually manage a team.
> The Browns did bottom out to get Baker Mayfield; how’d that go?
Browns fan in. Baker had them legit good the COVID year - beat the Steelers in the playoffs, then lost to the Chiefs in large part to a hugely controversial call. Then Baker hurt his non-throwing shoulder trying to tackle someone on and interception that happened because the sprinter masquerading as a wide receiver (Anthony Schwartz) stopped his route. Then Jimmy Haslam, already famous for being a criminal and drafting Johnny Eightball when told to do so by a houseless person in downtown Cleveland told him to, made one of the worst trades in NFL history. Andrew Berry has had really good drafts the last two years which underscores your point.
Funny that Aaron Rodgers thought he would go #1 to his hometown 49ers who instead took Alex Smith. And that SF is killing it this year with Mr. Irrelevant Brock Purdy (further demonstrating your point).
I was also in Boston when Tom Brady happened; earlier that year I nearly physically ran into Drew Bledsoe. Just to keep things nerdy on HN, later that year I brought down the uni's network but it was not Harvard. Maybe I shouldn't have paid attention to sports so much
QBs are important in the NFL, but so are the other 21 starters, not to mention the reserve players. Consistently going 8-8 or better every year means that a team doesn't have access to high quality talent at a price discount. This is a problem for ultimately winning a championship in any sport with a salary cap.
Tomlin is a poster child of how hard it is to drop early impressions of someone. He came in as a hot shot, but after last season he was going on 8 years since a single playoff victory.
He stayed at the Steelers too long. He should have gone somewhere with a better QB, the Steelers should have bottomed out enough to be able to draft a good QB.
Andy Reid is retiring when he gets his 303rd regular season win. At nearly the same time, Tomlin is going to find he once again has the zest for coaching.
He did the best with what he had, as all coaches in the NFL are bound to do. He dealt with a Big Ben playing well into his decline, then a bunch of 2nd and 3rd string QBs, and then the prima donna/flake Aaron Rodgers, which was likely the deciding point for his retirement. He could have had his pick of coaching jobs if he wanted, and the steelers record over his tenure was something most teams would dream of.
Overall > 0.5 win rate each year: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/coaches/TomlMi0.htm
But after 2016, playoffs? Not so much.