2026 Steelers Coaching Staff

https://steelersdepot.com/2026/07/s...he-nfls-smallest-coaching-staff-2026-edition/

The 2026 Steelers still have the smallest coaching staff in the league and have added two coaches from previous editions. One is a special teams coach.

An interesting bit of context is that this is a smaller staff than McCarthy fielded in Dallas.

I think it is because my brain is broken, but I find this hilarious. I spent most of the last several off-seasons reading about how Mike Tomlin specifically was sabotaging the Steelers success with his insistence on small coaching staffs. Seems like that narrative may have totally been an invention of the internet and not moored to reality.

Note: This is about the debates over quantity not quality. Many, many, many people loudly shouted on the internet simply for MORE coaches.

 

Something that many of us tried telling the masses that it was probably not the coaches decision, but You know how many like to make scapegoats, its easier for their minds to handle by being able to pin it on one person.

 

Perhaps.

I do not know the cause, but I do know that this, like most things in life, is far more complex and multi-faceted than the "easy" narrative that gets put out there.

So it makes me chuckle on the inside when complexity gets proven out over simplicity.

 

All I know is there was one common denominator during the last 8 seasons within the Pittsburgh Steelers. Mike Popcorn Tomlin at HC.

Can't blame Canada. Can't blame Butler. Can't blame Smith. Can't blame Austin.

 

get it right
in the meantime

FIFY
Got to give @CK 13 some props too

 

Tomlin retired

 

Seems pretty clear that Rooney doesn't want to pay for a big staff. [ETA: I think @Rollers is right here. It's something of a trend, but there are too few coaches in the sample to really know anything. Thanks Rollers!]

I think Alex K looked at this and found that generally old coaches have small staffs and young coaches have huge ones. I think he also found that number of coaches wasn't correlated to better performance.

I think Billy B usually had a smaller staff than Tomlin did.

 

But he was HC for the past 8 seasons. I'm disgruntled and I'm not gonng to relent and quit complaining until Steelers win another damn Super Bowl!

So you better get used to my anti-Popcorn banter. I'm here to stay and I don't give a sh!t if people don't like how I "think."

 

Tomlin wanted a smaller coaching staff because he was worried some of his coaches would show him up

 

Tomlin retired

 

I don't care.

 

@FootballAnalyst98 and @steelersrule6 repeatedly have taken the same thought process

Nice company you keep

 

Football Analyst is a Ravens fan. He liked Lamar and OBJ more than Steelers.

Steelersrule6 is a classic pollyanna Steelers fan wearing the rose-colored glasses. He's not alone.

 

I guess if the offense struggles this season we have to blame Tom Arth since he's the only Tomlin offensive assistant left. There are 2 left over on the defensive side so I guess they can share blame for any defensive woes.


(You'll just have to imagine the green font)

 

The quality of the coaching staff in the last several years was a bigger problem that the quantity.Having Canada as OC for almost 3 years was a disgrace

 

But, but, but... it was Colbert and Khan who hired Canada.

 

When Bruce Arians went to Tampa Bay, it seemed like he had a legion of coaches.
He had coaches looking at every move players did from day 1 of any mini camp or session.
He was trying to change a culture there.
He had 28 coaches.
We have 17.

Other than that, I don't know what else to say.

 

Now...think it all the way through...take the last step...

Why were coaches not fired? Was it Tomlin staying loyal (the prevailing wisdom for years among Steelers fans), Rooney not authorizing a dismissal of coach he would still have to pay, or some combination of the two?

The static size of the Steelers coaching staff under a new HC and that HC hiring fewer coaches than in his previous stops, it would seem that the blame for not firing coaches is not 100% on Tomlin.

I am by no means saying that is what you were discussing...but I think we should all remember that despite our desire as fans to have "winning uber alles" be the motto for every decision a team makes -- it clearly is not. Complexity.

 

The stains have had one of the largest coaching staffs for a while now.

What's your point?

 

So the Steelers have 21 coaches. San Francisco, Las Vegas Raiders and those amazing cleveland browns have 28. 2 of those 3 teams are horrible and the 9ers haven't done much lately. There are a bunch with 26 or 27 coaches. How much would it really cost the Steelers to pay for an additional 5 coaches. Assistant coaches salaries run between 400,000 and 600,000. So under 3 million a year. you really think that's a reason they don't hire more coaches? I don't think that's it. Maybe they think 21 is sufficient. Not sure it has anything to do with the cost

 

I like the staff on the offensive side of the ball. They're not all great or anything, like Cignetti for example. But the OC hire looks good to me. The OL hire looks excellent. And the QB hire is intriguing as hell.

Arth played QB, he's got an impressive record as a Div III coach, and he's going to quickly be in play for OC roles around this league if the Steelers offense shows well.

Now defensively I am not so certain. Fingers crossed though.

 

Size doesn't matter. .. (so I was told )

 

I think you're right that I don't know if it's Rooney or not. I modified my original post to point this out.

But it seems like both Tomlin and MM have opted for small staffs with the Steelers. I guess we could look at what Cowher's staff number was relative to the rest of the league at that time. But he worked mostly under Dan and not Art II IIRC.

I think I heard that MM's staff headcount was bigger in Dallas. We don't know what Tomlin's head count would look like under another owner.

Again, Alex K said that when he looked at it there seemed to be (1) a correlation with HC age (younger coaches == bigger staffs) and (2) not a good correlation between staff head count and winning.

I was expecting a young coach and not MM. Seems like that would have been a somewhat better test of this than hiring an old coach like MM. Either way, the sample size of what HC's do with the Steelers is so small that I don't think we can really tell anything meaningful (except that they've picked excellent coaches the three times before MM...hopefully MM pans out too).

 

You may well be correct.

MM's staff was larger in Dallas.

Once is a quirk, twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend.

So for the Steelers we have a coincidence perhaps? Related to sample size?

I would agree that the size of the coaching staff has no correlation with winning or losing. I just wanted to point out that something that was argued by the faceless voices on the internet as Tomlin's choice....may not have been?