Tim Benz: Blaming assistant coaches won't fix Pittsburgh's plodding sports teams

During a recent episode of “The Carton Show” on FS1, retired Pittsburgh Steeler Willie Colon said his former coach Mike Tomlin is in hot water.

“I love Mike Tomlin. But I have to officially say he is on the hot seat,” Colon said. “When you talk about his overall record, you talk about 17 seasons, where he has an 8-10 playoff record, only four seasons with playoff wins, and he’s had some bonafide teams, even with Ben Roethlisberger. The issue with Mike Tomlin right now is he wins games he’s supposed to win, but he loses games he shouldn’t lose.”

Colon went on to cite those painful defeats in early December of last year in back-to-back games at home to the lowly Arizona Cardinals and New England Patriots.

“No business losing those games,” Colon continued. “Now Steeler Nation is frustrated because they’re looking at an organization that is well above average, and then they lose bonehead games. I’m saying to myself, ‘Well, who are the Pittsburgh Steelers?’ Are they the bullies, or are they the dweebs right now? If you lost to the Patriots and the Cardinals, you look like the dweebs.”

First off, kudos to Colon for bringing “dweebs” back into the American lexicon. That’s a useful dig. I feel like I haven’t heard that one since the mid-1990s.

Secondly, I also give Colon credit for being a former Tomlin player who isn’t afraid to call out the coach’s track record of recent shortcomings on a national platform. Most former Steelers in that role simply retreat to, “Don’t you know Mike Tomlin has never had a losing season?!” They never look at how that outdated stat was built, and, by extension, neither does the rest of America.

The only problem with Colon’s statement about Tomlin being “on the hot seat” is that … well, it isn’t true. It should be. But it isn’t.

Tomlin isn’t on the hot seat with Steelers president Art Rooney II. Nor will he be until he finally has a losing season. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he won’t be on the hot seat until he has multiple losing seasons in a row.

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That’s simply how much faith the Steelers have in Tomlin despite evidence to the contrary that he no longer has the magic touch he possessed in his first five seasons. Those years led to two Super Bowl appearances, three division titles, a Vince Lombardi Trophy and a 55-25 record.

Instead, his offensive coordinators are always “on the hot seat.” Newly appointed Arthur Smith is the fifth under Tomlin. None of the previous four left entirely of their own accord.

Similarly, with the Penguins, Mike Sullivan is entering the extension portion of his contract, despite failing to win a playoff round since the start of the 2019 postseason and failing to make the playoffs the past two years.

Instead of firing him, the Penguins just fired assistant coach Todd Reirden on Friday. This is the second time we’ve seen tinkering with Sullivan’s staff without Sullivan himself being touched. After the 2020 season, former general manager Jim Rutherford announced that assistants Mark Recchi, Sergei Gonchar and Jacques Martin wouldn’t get new contracts.

With the Pirates, hitting coach Andy Haines is the guy getting his feet held to the fire. That’s understandable given the Bucs’ atrocious offense this year and minimal results since his appointment in advance of the 2022 season. If Haines is fired, though, that would mean that Derek Shelton — a manager with a hitting coach background himself — would be getting his third such assistant in that role since his own arrival in 2020.

Even though his career record is 234-347.

That’s just what we do here in Pittsburgh now — from both a fan and media perspective. We fire slings and arrows at the assistant coaches, directing all of our ire at them because ranting about the head coaches just feels like screaming into the void.

That’s mainly because upper management with all three professional sports teams in town are, in general, far too comfortable with their given states of mediocrity and low bars of success. As a result, very little pressure is applied to the head coaches/managers.

As referenced early in this post (and probably 10 times before you left your house today), Mike Tomlin has never had a losing season.

That’s good enough for Rooney II, even though Tomlin has also been without a playoff win for seven years — a franchise-record-long drought dating back to the Immaculate Reception. Even the legendary Chuck Noll was eased into retirement after he went six such years over a seven-season stretch between 1985-91. Bill Cowher was starting to feel a squeeze after three years from 1998-2000.

But because of what Tomlin did over his first four or five seasons, he appears to be beyond reproach. Similarly, Sullivan’s two Stanley Cups in 2016-17 feel recent. But his last playoff series victory in the first round of 2018 sure doesn’t. In hockey terms, six years without a playoff-round win is a famine.

Yet Fenway Sports Group and new general manager Kyle Dubas seem perfectly content to see the shine on those two Cups as if they were won with Sullivan as their hire (which he wasn’t), and they all practically recoil at any suggestion that a head coaching change is necessary.

By comparison, after he won the 2009 Stanley Cup, former head coach Dan Byslma only lasted five additional seasons, and his team won four total playoff rounds in that time.

In terms of Shelton, his .403 winning percentage is what it is. Then again, given the lack of a competitive roster he has been given to work with over the years, maybe it’s general manager Ben Cherington who should be the focal point of this conversation from a Pirates perspective instead of the on-field manager.

Either way, I’m going to go out on a really shaky limb here and proclaim that swapping out the hitting coach isn’t the cure-all for what ails the Pirates organization.

Bold, eh?

That’s not to say that Haines isn’t deserving of scrutiny. Nor am I absolving Reirden, who just coached the Pens’ hideous power play to a 30th-place finish in the NHL despite some Hall of Fame talent. Nor am I suggesting that Matt Canada should’ve kept his job with the Steelers before being ousted in midseason last year.

Every one of those guys — and many of their predecessors — were worthy of replacement. But what about the men who hired them and/or have been their superiors on the staff of each franchise? What about management and ownership of franchises?

No, none of us are going to be able to buy teams away from any of the current owners. We can’t make them change their coaches and managers. But we can point out when fractional change is being made and empty scapegoating is happening.

It’s the head coaches in this city — and their bosses and underperforming players — that need to feel the blowback for the City of Champions fading into the City of Early Elimination.

At least Colon is speaking the truth. The rest of us can try from time to time in whatever forum we have as well. A column like this. A talk show. A blog. A social media post. Whatever.

But who are we? Just a bunch of dweebs.

Unfortunately, until ownership and upper management of the three local franchises start to feel the least bit uncomfortable with the steady flow of pedestrian results their teams are generating, it’s just going to be the assistant coaches who take the blame.

And, really, what’s that going to do?