Peter King on Tomlin - can't help but think about Judge

Reading through Peter King's article this morning, this section stood out. To be clear, King is talking about minority coaches getting an opportunity and using Tomlin as an example of the coaching talent you can find if you have an open mind and a good process. I couldn't help but think of the Judge hire going through this though.

OBVIOUSLY Judge is nowhere near Tomlin as a coach. He needs about a decade of sustained success and a ring or two before we talk about that. Just thought a number of these points hit the mark, and it makes me excited about the future:

Quote:

Ten lessons Mike Tomlin can teach the NFL about fixing the head-coach hiring process, which includes increasing the inclusiveness for people of color: 1. Survey the entire field, not just the candidates you know. When 34-year-old Tomlin walked into the Steelers offices in Pittsburgh in January 2007, he shook hands with club czars Dan Rooney and Art Rooney II for the first time. They’d never met. The leading candidates for the job, Ken Whisenhunt and Russ Grimm, were on the Steeler staff; the Steelers had already satisfied the Rooney Rule—mandating at least one minority be interviewed for every head-coach opening—by interviewing Ron Rivera, of Hispanic descent. “He came in cold,” Art Rooney, son of Dan, told me about Tomlin last week. “[GM] Kevin Colbert put him on the list for us to look at.” 2. Open your eyes. After the first meeting with Tomlin, who’d just finished his rookie year as a coordinator (in Minnesota), Dan Rooney looked at Art and said: “He’s a real candidate.” The Rooneys had high regard for Whisenhunt and Grimm, but there was something commanding about Tomlin, though he was so young. That hadn’t bugged the Rooney family when they’d hired the unknown Chuck Noll at 37, or the better-known Bill Cowher at 34. They wanted to be careful to not be insular, a great lesson for teams today. 3. Listen to the people you truly trust. It’s possible that of anyone in the football business the Rooneys would trust about Tomlin, Tony Dungy was at the top of the list. Dungy had played for Chuck Noll, coached under Noll, and was tight with the Rooneys—and Dungy had hired Tomlin as his secondary coach in Tampa in 2001. The week the Steelers interviewed Tomlin, Dungy was preparing to coach the Colts in a divisional playoff game against higher-seeded Baltimore. Dan Rooney called him, mindful of his schedule but needing his counsel. “Dan told me, ‘He’s really impressed us. Tell me about him,’ “ Dungy recalled. “There was a twinkle in his voice. I could tell even though he’d just met Mike, he was intrigued.” Dungy shared with Dan Rooney that Tomlin would be a great match for the Steeler ethos. “He had the Steeler philosophy. We’re going to do it our way, and not worry about anyone else. He was young, he was tough, and he was a great communicator with young players,” Dungy said. Art Rooney told me that without a strong recommendation from someone he and his father knew well and trusted, they might not have hired Tomlin. 4. Don’t care about winning the press conference. The Rooneys didn’t care in 1969 when they were openly questioned for hiring Noll, a little-known assistant for the Colts. They didn’t care when locals thought Grimm should have been the call in 2007, and the choice of Tomlin would unintentionally shake up the coaching staff. “We hired Mike because he was the best candidate for the job,” Art Rooney said, “and really, nothing else mattered.” 5. Hire a coach who is a leader of people, and a good teacher. So often, the top-candidate lists for head-coaching jobs are lists of the best coordinators in the NFL. It’s good, of course, to find coaches who are great on one side of the ball, or to hire coaches from a great tree. But Tomlin wasn’t hired because he worked under Dungy for one season, or because in his lone season as a coordinator he bossed the 14th-best scoring defense in the NFL. It was his presence, his knowledge of the game, and his ability to coach and deal with the modern player. That goes, too, for the coaches on the staff. Though he was a coordinator in Minnesota, Tomlin gave the defense to incumbent defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau when he arrived. LeBeau’s defenses were second and first in scoring defense in the league in 2007 and ’08. 6. Hire a coach who is comfortable dishing out discipline. When Antonio Brown live-streamed Tomlin’s post-game talk to his team after a playoff win in January 2017, Tomlin called it “foolish, selfish and inconsiderate. We will punish him.” Part of the job. Tomlin didn’t shy away from confrontation. “A good coach has to be good at confrontation,” Bill Parcells says, and if you were around the Giants in the eighties (I was), you saw it often, and sometimes on national TV. 7. Hire a coach who can build an unbreakable bond with the players. In a playoff game in the 2010 season, Pittsburgh trailed Baltimore at halftime 21-7. All week, Tomlin told his team it would face some adversity. At halftime, he told his players they were built for this, they trained for this. On the way back to the field for the second half, he put an arm around safety Ryan Clark’s shoulders and said, “Wait till they see this comeback! The stories you guys will have—you’ll never forget this day!” Clark played the half of his life, forcing a fumble that led to a TD; Baltimore, 21-14. He intercepted Joe Flacco, leading to another TD; Tie, 21-21. Steelers won, 31-24. “If coach T doesn’t talk to me like that,” Clark told me last week, “I don’t think that happens. I honestly don’t think it happens. He had that effect on us.” 8. Hire a coach who’s okay with throwing players overboard. When Le’Veon Bell’s contract demands weren’t met after the 2017 season, he sat out the ’18 season and Tomlin didn’t seem too bothered by it. When Antonio Brown went AWOL before the final game of 2018, Tomlin told his agent he didn’t want Brown back for the game, and Brown never played for the Steelers again; Tomlin was okay with that too. Since Bell played his last game for the Steelers, Pittsburgh is 26-14-1. Since Brown went AWOL, Pittsburgh is 18-8. And keep in mind that 14 of those games for both players were played without Ben Roethlisberger. Bell and Brown would have been headaches if they’d stayed—so just move on. The Steelers now have very good and fairly ego-less receiver and running back groups, and, at midseason, are sixth in the league in scoring with Bell and Brown long gone. 9. Hire a coach who doesn’t care how famous he is. Ryan Clark told me he wondered why Tomlin didn’t share more with the press, “why he didn’t expound on decisions he made or why he game-planned a certain way or why he didn’t share how he good of a motivator he is.” So he asked Tomlin once. “He told me, ‘Those things are personal. I want you guys to get a glimpse of me, but I don’t need to share my soul with the rest of the world,’ “ Clark said. “I respected that. The players respected that. It made me feel like what we did in the building and the locker room and the stadium was sacred to him.” It’s reminiscent of Noll. 10. Have a good quarterback in-house. It helps to take over a team with a 25-year-old franchise quarterback just entering his prime. Writing the Tomlin story in Pittsburgh without mentioning Ben Roethlisberger’s importance to winning would be naïve. As with Belichick/Brady in New England, a coach looks a lot better when he’s got a Hall of Fame quarterback playing for him.

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