Tim Benz: For Mike Tomlin, the 'process' must finally lead to progress

The next time the Pittsburgh Steelers convene at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, it’ll be for a game-week practice. Sunday’s season opener against the New York Jets is officially next on the agenda.

The phrases “offseason” and “preseason” will be shelved until next year. All that work from those months on the calendar has been done to whatever extent it could be completed.

Time to finally turn the page to games that count.

“The process isn’t done yet,” Tomlin said after the final preseason practice on Wednesday. “It’s just part of the process, but largely, to get the group out here and get a good day’s work in before we head into the weekend.”

That “process” began with free agency back in March and extended all the way up to the completion of the season-opening 53-man roster this week.

So … how did it go?

“I enjoyed it. So from that perspective, it was good,” Tomlin said. “We reserve judgment in totality until we assess how it (prepares) us for the journey. In a short number of days, we can get the first component of that test.”

And that’s the key part, isn’t it? You never hear players here say, “What are we doing? What’s happening here? This doesn’t make sense.”

Tomlin is good at creating buy-in. The day-to-day work never seems to fall into question from a “process” standpoint.

The Steelers always seem to be good at the process. They just rarely seem to make much progress.

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At some point, eventually, the process has to result in the franchise progressing out of its eight-year rut of never advancing beyond the first round of the playoffs.

That’s despite the fact that their process has constantly resulted in teams that were at least good enough to finish .500 or better.

That’s a chasm that can’t simply be spoken away.

To be fair to the Steelers, they have changed their process a bit over the last few years. They have been more willing to make changes and punt on plans that haven’t worked.

Just look at the quarterback room alone. Kenny Pickett, Mitch Trubisky, Justin Fields and Russell Wilson all arrived and departed between the start of 2022 and the beginning of 2025. Mason Rudolph was a backup, a starter, a departing free agent, and a returning acquisition all within that stretch.

That’s to say nothing of being willing to erase mistakes instead of stubbornly holding onto players who, for various reasons, just didn’t work out after being drafted or signing significant contracts.

That goes for the likes of Diontae Johnson, George Pickens, Kendrick Green, Najee Harris and Donte Jackson.

“The way we ended last year wasn’t good enough,” general manager Omar Khan said of the 0-5 collapse. “We talked about change having to happen. I know people maybe expected change sooner than later, but change doesn’t always happen at the pace everybody expects. We knew changes had to be made, and here we are.”

Yeah. Here we are. Trusting that this time the process will yield different results.

Maybe that’s why a segment of the Steelers fanbase isn’t acknowledging the amount of change that has truly transpired. So long as Tomlin is on the sideline and the team is owned by someone whose last name is Rooney, there’s reason to view the organization’s beloved commitment to consistency as nothing more than stagnation and a commitment to mediocrity.

Sweeping changes to the roster appear to be bucking that trend. The quarterback room is different. The secondary has been largely overhauled. The front seven was tweaked, as was the running back depth chart. Three of this year’s primary pass catchers are new.

One of those new guys is tight end Jonnu Smith. He’s played with four other organizations (Miami, New England, Tennessee and Atlanta). He’s got other experiences to use as comps to Pittsburgh’s approach to season-prep.

He agrees with Tomlin about the process being good but also understands that means nothing if the team eventually falls short of its goals.

“We’ve got to go out there and prove it — all the talk, all the work that we put in out there, that it’s worthy to say that we are going to compete for the big one,” Smith said. “We have to bring that to fruition.”

Meanwhile, Rudolph has been here for seven of the past eight offseasons.

“I think it’s been good. I think it’s good that we had a couple of rainouts (at training camp) and a couple of injuries. You learn to overcome some things as a team early on in the process,” Rudolph said. “This team just feels very veteran, and I enjoyed Latrobe this year for the first time in a while.”

Granted, Rudolph says he made that comment because he had his own room this summer at Saint Vincent College, and he didn’t have a 300-pound offensive lineman snoring in his ear as he had in years gone by.

But now the quest for the Steelers is to avoid finding themselves in hibernation after the second week in January, as they have every year since 2016.

Personally, I’ll wait to see that kind of progress before preemptively selling myself on the process.

After the last eight years, I think that caution is warranted.

LISTEN: Jeff Erickson of RotoWire has last-minute Fantasy Football draft advice with Tim Benz.