Jan 6, 2018 4 min read

Mike Tomlin won’t get many votes for NFL Coach of the Year. After all, the Steelers have done what they were supposed to do this season.

They easily won the AFC North by a comfortable four-game margin. They’ve won 22 of their past 26 games.

But the way Tomlin has guided his team to this point has been masterful.

The Steelers are one replay and one bad replay away from being 14-2 despite having a season so tumultuous it makes a daytime soap opera look tame in comparison.

The troubles started with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger talking about retirement only two days after the team lost in last year’s AFC Championship, continued with the death of team chairman Dan Rooney and have continued through the holdout of Le’Veon Bell, flag controversies in Chicago and the release of James Harrison and so many things that they seem minor in comparison to the others.

Even the spinal injury suffered by linebacker Ryan Shazier couldn’t shake this team for a full game.

Through it all, the Steelers have continued to win.

Tomlin deserves some credit for that. Of course, his detractors will point to many of the issues and say they are because he doesn’t run as tight a ship as, say New England coach Bill Belichick. That’s silly, but it’s the argument the Tomlin haters bring forth because they don’t have a lot else to fall back on.

Funny thing is, distractions are only distractions if you allow them to be. And the Steelers haven’t done that this season because of the way Tomlin has handled his team.

It also helps that he has strong leadership from his players. That was a question mark only a few years ago as players such as James Farrior, Troy Polamalu, Aaron Smith and Brett Keisel faded into the sunset. They were players who were big parts of the team’s success for the past decade. And when they left, the replacements weren’t guys who had been through the battles those guys had seen.

But having played six playoff games over the previous three seasons with largely the same cast of characters, this team has bonded.

“We grew up as a team,” Bell said. “We had things off the field and guys kind of bonded and talked about it. We weren’t necessarily putting it out in the media. We were trying to solve it. That’s the biggest thing for us; we’ve been able to get over all of our problems. We had a lot of things blow up. We all resolved that inside our locker room by ourselves. We’re a talented group.”

They’ve reached a maturity level as well, led by guys such as Cameron Heyward, Ramon Foster, David DeCastro and, yes, even Roethlisberger.

Will it be good enough to add up to a Super Bowl victory? That remains to be seen. But the Steelers expect wide receiver Antonio Brown back for next weekend’s playoff opener. With the notable exception of Shazier, they’re as healthy as they were coming into this season.

That’s something they haven’t been in previous years, when they’ve been missing key pieces to the puzzle.

This time, it’s Super Bowl or bust.

“We want to feel like we’re going in at full power, full strength, in the playoffs,” Bell said. “If we lose, we’ll be like, ‘OK, there’s nothing we can say about it. There’s no more excuses.’ We’ve got to get back there. If guys beat us the way we are, then so be it. I just don’t feel that’s the case.”

Tomlin has instilled that in this team. It’s the reason why the players have openly talked about winning the Super Bowl since they first began OTAs in the spring.

It’s the reason why Tomlin didn’t back away from talking about it more than a month ago with NBC’s Tony Dungy in a television interview.

Tomlin knows he has a talented team, one capable of going into Gillette Stadium and winning in two weeks. And if that doesn’t happen, Bell will be right. There won’t be room for excuses.

But when you consider that the last five times – all losses – the Steelers have played the Patriots, they have had Roethlisberger, Brown and Bell start and finish those games just twice, wouldn’t it be nice to see how the Steelers measure up against them at full strength?

We’re inching closer to that point.