Arthur Smith engineered Mike Tomlin’s offense for two seasons with the Steelers. After Tomlin stepped down yesterday, Smith reflected on his former boss. You’re bound to hear many similar things in the coming days, but it’s different coming from somebody still on staff. Smith is interviewing for the Titans’ head coaching job, but at least for now, he’s still in Pittsburgh.
“It just came down to this—he had his own unique relationship with every player and every coach”, Arthur Smith told Albert Breer for Sports Illustrated after the news of Mike Tomlin’s resignation broke. “He’s just a very approachable person. And then he’s got a lot of empathy, and I think he took everybody on, and he saw that person as an individual. And that’s why he had his own relationship with them”.
Tomlin’s defining quality will go down as being his leadership. He took to it as a service that called to him, and he embraced that aspect of his job while also pursuing it outside of work. Likely rooted in his family history, the ability to reach others is a skill he relished and utilized fully. But he also has a deep love and knowledge of football, Arthur Smith said.
While many outsiders choose to perceive Tomlin as some sort of novice, it flies in the face of what everybody who has ever actually worked with him seems to say about his football acumen, whether that comes from players or coaches. Smith offered a nugget to Breer about the depth of Tomlin’s work while they built a game plan each week.
“He did that with all three phases—where he would talk through what he saw and give you his opinion for, defensively, how they were built and stuff that we’re doing schematically”, he said, after Tomlin would emerge from his private office watching and cutting up film to distribute to his coaches for the week to kick things into gear. “He did a good job of kind of setting the table for the entire team. And it carried over in his team meetings”.
Evidently, Tomlin had an extraordinary knack for knowing exactly what the Steelers needed to do to win each week, whether or not they would actually be able to go out there and do it. It’s something we heard from players repeatedly, Tomlin having a sixth sense of how a game would unfold. Arthur Smith and Todd Haley also talked to Breer about that very same thing. Haley said sometimes Tomlin would tell him he needed 17 points from him, other weeks 30-plus.
Regardless of Tomlin’s credentials, he knows better than anybody that football is a results-based business. And he knows that he didn’t produce the results that he or anybody else sought. Nine straight seasons of no playoff wins, seven straight playoff losses, including five straight blowouts. The Steelers may not have fired him, but he seems to have fired himself. So what’s next for Arthur Smith? Surely an interview for Tomlin’s job will be coming.
