In getting around to sorting out all your comments for the weekly Sound-Off, I’m noticing an incredibly ubiquitous refrain: “Trade Tomlin.”
To me, this is the elevated form of the colloquial FAHR TAWMLIM discourse that has permeated online spaces like this for the better part of — oh, I don’t know, let’s say the entirety of Mike Tomlin’s tenure as head coach of the Steelers. It’s an intriguing pivot, and one rooted in rationality and practicality: if the consensus states—or more accurately seems to reflect—that Tomlin and the Steelers are bound to split potentially as early as this offseason, and very possibly next offseason when his current contract expires, then it makes sense to leverage his demonstrated aptitude to get something in return rather than firing him and getting nothing.
And this is something that makes sense to me, a nominal blogger who writes for expendable gambling income and to whom the inner workings of NFL management might as well be particle physics. Do you know who else might draw similar conclusions, that the Steelers want to get value in return for a commodity they may intend to discard regardless? That would be the front office of any other NFL team that might be interested in acquiring Tomlin’s services.
It is not a realistic expectation for another professional football franchise, one composed of an armada of experts in business and football operations, to trade prime draft capital for a head coach who has one year remaining on his contract. I think we can safely kill this narrative and bury it deep. The Steelers are not going to trade Mike Tomlin for a first-round draft pick, largely because no team is going to offer the Steelers a first-round draft pick in exchange for Mike Tomlin.
I wrote about this in a bit more depth in the last Sound-Off column, but trades for head coaches are extremely infrequent (this page details about a half-dozen such trades over the last 25ish years) and when they do occur, there is usually some sort of unique circumstance that justifies such as big swing. Taking the most recent example, the Broncos went all-in before the 2022 season by bringing on Nathaniel Hackett as a ploy to entice Aaron Rodgers, but ultimately “settled” for Russell Wilson when Plan A didn’t come to fruition. The 2022 season went about as poorly as it could’ve: Russell, freshly signed to one of the biggest contracts ever, had by far the worst season of his career, Hackett was fired before the last game of the regular season, and the Broncos finished the year 5-12.
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