PITTSBURGH — Including Mike Tomlin, the Steelers have 22 coaches, by my count. Twenty-two coaches who've held various specialized coaching positions at 148 places and accumulated 584 years of coaching experience.
Apparently, that's not enough.
In the week that Tomlin's 16th Steelers team broke training camp, the question that appears to be befuddling many of the national NFL prognosticators as well as our nation's finest professional odds makers is, apparently, "How are you supposed to win even eight games in this NFL with only 22 coaches, let alone just 584 years of experience at 148 jobs?"
Unless I'm misinterpreting something, and what are the odds of that?
The number of projected wins most associated with the Pittsburgh entry in the looming NFL autumn is 7. You might see an over/under of 7.5 here and there (with an advisory to "lean under") as well as some other outlier numbers, but 7 wins is generally what America anticipates from a franchise that has long prided itself on a Super Bowl-or-bust ethos.
Who could have imagined that in all this time climbing the Stairway to 7, they were actually going down the up staircase?
The Baltimore Ravens have 24 coaches.
The Miami Dolphins have 27.
The Cleveland Browns have 29, including one designated "chief of staff." Perhaps they should add a Secretary of State.
The defending AFC-champion Cincinnati Bengals (oh yeah, look it up) have 23 coaches and this distinctly innovative wrinkle: In addition to the standard deployments, a special teams coach, a running backs coach, a tight ends coach, a defensive line coach, a wide receivers coach, etc., the Bengals have Doug Rosfeld, their "director of coaching operations," — that's right, a coach coach.
Chuck Noll's first Steelers staff has six assistant coaches, meaning that had they put their minds to it, they could all have gone to practice in the same 1969 Bonneville. Now, of course, you need a bus.
The Steelers have long been relative minimalists when it comes to staff size, a true statement even with Tomlin's 21 assistants. They have one special teams coach (Danny Smith) while other clubs have up to four and yet remain susceptible to peculiarities when it comes to assignments.
Tomlin's 2022 staff has an inside linebackers coach (Jerry Olsavsky) and an assistant outside linebackers coach (Denzel Martin), but no outside linebackers coach, per se. Outside linebackers are the purview of Senior Defensive Assistant Coach Brian Flores. The peculiar part isn't so much in the staffing; it's that while the Steelers have an inside linebackers coach, they have no inside linebackers, which is a tough way to win.
It was inevitable that coaching staffs would expand as coaches made the game more specialized, but the way different head coaches have adapted (or failed to) remains highly unpredictable. Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid, for example, was employing 22 coaches nine years ago, including a "spread game analyst."
"You break it down and you have red zone, short yardage, nickel, and then you have all these different personnel groups," he explained in an interview with the New York Times in 2013. "So you try to hire teachers to teach all these things you want to do."
Bruce Arians, the former Steelers assistant who went on to be head coach of the Arizona Cardinals and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has explained the expansion of the coaching roster as having the identical benefit correlative as student/teacher ratio. The more teachers, and thus the fewer students per teacher, the greater the benefit.
Fair enough, and that Arians philosophy, coupled with the happy reality that there is no coaches salary cap, has helped get us to the era of the assistant tight ends coach.
The Steelers, by keeping their staff relatively streamlined, have left plenty of open field for coaching innovation, so the possibilities for augmentation remain plentiful.
Currently, for example, they have no long snappers coach, no assistant holders coach, no slot corner coach, no assistant slot receivers coach, no jet sweep coordinator, no assistant bubble screen coach, no nickel back coach, no dime back coach, no nickel and dime coordinator.
The club could clearly use a social media coach, someone who is not so much adept at the various digital platforms but highly effective at keeping people from saying something stupid online. This would be a position not unlike the so-called "get back" coach, an assistant designated to keep players on the sideline by yelling "get back!" If your team is constantly being penalized for too many men on the field, you need to fire your get back coach.
The social media coach would be the person who bursts into the postgame locker room and screams, "Don't any of you knuckleheads post what the coach says on Facebook Live!"
Not that anyone ever would or anything.
