Good article on Tomlin and Cowher

I owed you anyway! LOL!!!

 

because our recent seasons are redundant too

tomlin is sending our franchise down to the bottom

 

I am not saying that Tomlin is perfect but he is a good coach. He is as good or close to Cowher.

Cowher was not perfect. Cowher lost to bad teams too.

Fred Taylor ran for 234 yards against Cowher's team in 2000. That sucks bad.

 

loosing ?

 

cowher was an average /above average coach
tomlin is a joke
the first two years our team was running by ward hampton smit ben , tomlin was learning ..then when the core of the team retire
you see what tomlin is doing

 

Yeah, but you as well as others have said the same things about Tomlin over and over and over ! What's the purpose of recycling the same stuff?
Time for another topic maybe? Until Ben has a bad game , then that whole topic will be regurgitated over and over by the same folks.

 

I respect that opinion, but still think that both Cowher and Tomlin are about equal as coaches and both good.

The opinion that Cowher was good or great and Tomlin is bad has no grounds. Their difference is minimal imo.

If this team fixes their defensive sub-packages such as nickel and the o-line plays better, a championship is not out of the question. Receiver depth MAY be a question too.

The team started the season last year with key injuries then finished 6-2. The year before the team was very good until Ben got hurt with a slightly slow start, but looked like a contender 2/3's of the way through the season. Roster moves appear to be improvements.

The sky is not falling in my eyes, yet.

 

Good Post!

 

No, it was Ben, Eli, and Rivers at the time. Ben was called in for a visit, his only, and they came to the decision to draft him (obviously).
To imply Cowher, a head coach in the National Football league, wasn't interested in a Franchise QB, is laughable.
They were looking and found one!

 

Colbert said he had little to do with that, being he was just brought in, so I expect it was mostly cowher and the rooneys.

 

That makes sense, he was new himself, but regardless, I was responding to the previous poster that stated Cowher never 'really wanted' a Franchise QB. What??? Hogwash, he most certainly did and in fact that search didn't end until his career here was relatively over. Why was it over? he had found him, won a SB with him, goal achieved move on. Tomlin rolled right in w/o having to deal w/ the franchise QB search for an entire career!

Bottom line: Pitt, led by Bill Cowher and Rooney owned, drafted the only 1st rd QB in the lifetime of many on this board.

 

That's part of my concern, Blast, I am (or was) excited about the players we've drafted, especially in the first few rounds. The issue is that many of these players don't seem to be taking the step to the next level. Some started out well and then regressed (Pouncey) while others just basically don't seem to be improving that much. Ziggy Hood was average at best, Cam FINALLY showed flashes last season, Adams and Gilbert have struggled mightily, DD has some promise but has been part of an OL that's struggled, JJ's issues last season were well documented despite being a "plug and play steal" at number 17. His first number one, Timmons, has been up and down and Woodley fell off the face of the earth (and I know the hammies contributed to that). And how many marginal players are being coached up on this team right now? AB is an outlier and has a great work ethic so I'll give Tomlin some credit here, but it just seems to me that our young players are not being coached up to the next level and that has me worried. What do you think, do we have a coaching issue or are we just missing in the draft?

 

You talk like us "Tomlin bashers" started this thread just to bash Tomlin. We didn't. Someone posted a link discussing how Tomlin was gods gift to football coaches and how we should all so be fortunate just to say his name out loud (major exaggeration by the way). People with thoughts on this subject responded. I'm pretty sure that's what a message board is for. You're free not to read these kinds of topics if it bothers you so much

 

Or both, in some cases. In some cases, neither, and in others, one of the two.

Does that count as an answer?

I suppose what I'm saying is I don't look at every bad pick and say "That one's on Tomlin", because there are clearly other factors going on; or factors that couldn't be seen at the time of the pick. The task of backfilling spots that had been held by legends was always going to be tricky, especially for a young HC.

My feeling is that I expect a strong season now, but with the usual up and down bumpy ride that a team that is still in transition would expect. The difference this year is the amount of experienced coaching staff around, which means that naivety is no longer an excuse (if it ever was). That said, I'm still not going to automatically put every failure down to Tomlin (as I know you don't, Jack), as each needs to be scrutinised on its own merit.

 

Yeah, I'm not really down with drawing a line and saying there's two defined camps here. If we drew up a continuum with anti-Tomlin at one end and pro-Tomlin at the other, I'm guessing each person on the board would be sat in a different place. There are a lot of shades of grey in the debate, and even though when this thread started I was thinking "oh well, here we go again", it's thrown up some interesting discussion pieces.

 

Yeah, everyone has different thoughts on basically every subject, and it isn't black and white at all. My god, how boring would this message board be if certain people got their way and all we did was talk about how great everyone is and how great of a team we are despite missing the playoffs 2 years in a row. Lets be real, people have different opinions and some of us are simply tired of what we see as a team that is underperforming, so we come to a message board to express those thoughts.

 

We're just responding to the thread. Actually, it didn't start as a "bash" Tomlin thread. To me, it was a response to Cook's article, where he made a clear comparison between "Coach A" and "Coach B." I don't think it's a fair comparison for the reasons I stated.

Cowher was not perfect. Cowher embarrassed the franchise too (nearly punching a jaguar player). Cowher also had bad losses (Jax in 95, for example). But I stand by my contention that the 90s were different, and Cowher was continuously losing talent while rivals were loading up.

The main difference here is Ben. We all would like to think that Ben is a top or second tier QB. He's a two-time Super Bowl champion. With Ben at the helm, Tomlin SHOULD have a distinct advantage over the likes of the Chiefs (with Cassel), the Raiders (with Gradkowski or Pryor), and the Titans (with Locker). I know that injuries have been an issue, and I know every team had an ugly loss or two. But this team has several ugly losses a year. I can handle losing; if you're going to be a sports fan, you'd better be used to it. If you get beat, you get beat. But what I can't handle is consistently losing to lesser opponents because of poor execution and preparation. This is what I have seen from Tomlin's teams, now, for too long.

I sure hope I'm wrong and that the Steelers come out today on fire and get up on Cleveland early, 21-0 by halftime. But I am prepared for a struggle, where Hoyer or Manziel is allowed to go toe-to-toe with Ben, and this game is a nail-biter.

 

Duh, maybe the lack of talent has something to do with it also.

 

I fully understand how a message board works.
Someone posts a thread about tailgating and gets a couple responses.
Someone posts about what to do in Pittsburgh and gets a few responses.
Someone posts about Tomlin and five pages of complaining.

 

I don't buy the lack of talent argument, rule. How many times over the last several seasons have we come out of the draft feeling great about our draft picks? We've drafted some very good talent but I've been disappointed about the progress of some of our picks.

 

Roethlisberger slid and we got him, and we bettered our football team.” – Bill Cowher, on selecting a quarterback over a running back – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, April 26, 2004.


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