The NFL end game is never in question; it's to win the Super Bowl. As Mike Tomlin enters year 17 with the Steelers, the goal hasn't changed. 'It’s the pursuit of rare air.' But the motivational wind at Tomlin's back is different. ✍️ JimTrotter_NFL:
LATROBE, Pa. — Mike Tomlin is seated at a metal picnic bench outside his dorm at Saint Vincent College, where he has just opened his 17th training camp ashead coach. The perch is high enough that he can easily look past the practice fields below and see the rolling foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. The view seemingly stretches forever, eliciting a peace and tranquility that parallels Tomlin’s professional life.
Tomlin rarely indulges in public introspection. Information is on a need-to-know basis, whether personal or professional. It’s rare for him to elaborate on a comment like the one he made about his contract status, but last week was an occasion where he opened the door and welcomed a visitor in. I asked how he is different today than he was in his first training camp with the Steelers. The energy and attention are the same, he began, but the motivational wind at his back is different.
“The next year, he trusted us more. He gave us more space and more time to recover. He wasn’t worried about, ‘Oh, I’ve got to make them hit. I’ve got to be a certain way.’ He realized that if he got us to the stadium on Sunday, we were going to do what we needed to do for him.
You don’t achieve those things solely because you’re a powerful communicator. It’s also because you’re smart, talented and willing to listen, which Tomlin views as the first step in learning. In his first season, he was set up with two established coordinators, including Dick LeBeau, whose defensive system was different from what Tomlin had been tutored on early in his career.
“The analogy they used was swinging a golf club,” Tomlin said. “You might have a certain aptitude, but unless you go to the range and work at it, you can’t maximize it. When I heard it in that way, it hit me like a lightning bolt. It was sometime in the mid-90s. When you hear it’s a skill, that means some of us are naturally better at it than others, so you better know whether you’re good or bad at it. Either way, it’s something you can improve at.
“He’s able to show you that he cares,” Cam Heyward , a fixture for the Steelers’ defense since 2011, says of Tomlin. “He’s able to give you what you need, not what you want.”
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