Noll led Pittsburgh to four Super Bowl wins during his 23-season tenure. Cowher coached 15 years in Pittsburgh, leading the franchise to two Super Bowls and winning one. Tomlin brought the franchise's sixth Lombardi trophy to Pittsburgh in his second year as head coach in 2009 and reached another Super Bowl two years later, falling in defeat to Green Bay.During Tomlin’s 19 years in Pittsburgh, the team never finished with a losing record.

The Steelers won 10 games in each of Tomlin’s last three seasons with the franchise. Despite all the regular-season success, the criticism had become louder than the achievement. Pittsburgh hasn’t won a playoff game since 2017, and the last five postseason appearances for Tomlin’s Steelers ended in the wild-card round.

As one of the most celebrated organizations in the NFL, the recent lack of postseason success became hard to overlook. And for most of the last 10 years, Tomlin's Steelers hadn’t really been close. They reached the AFC championship game during the 2016-17 campaign, but every year since then, they’ve been eliminated in either wild-card or divisional rounds of the postseason.Now, Tomlin steps into a new realm and a whole new profession where his years of expertise should serve him well as a leader and storyteller. Instead of jumping immediately back into the trenches of coaching an NFL team, Tomlin lands where many thought he might once he finally parted ways with the Steelers.