Steelers Now
The Pittsburgh Steelers tossed their mold aside when they hired Mike McCarthy to replace longtime head coach Mike Tomlin this offseason. The franchise has been known to give the keys to young, defensive-minded stewards, but the former leader of the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys returned home.
Former NFL analyst Trey Wingo believes that McCarthy’s track record stacks up favorably against those of most current head coaches.
“I think Mike McCarthy’s a great coach,” Wingo said Friday on the “Straight Facts Homie!” podcast. “I think Mike McCarthy is a coach whose resume is very similar to that of Sean Payton’s, yet everyone seems to think wonderful things of Sean Payton, and we don’t have those same loving feelings about Mike McCarthy — for reasons that I don’t quite understand. One of them, I think, was the way it ended in Green Bay between Aaron and Mike.
“It felt like Mike was the one that was cast aside and they went all-in with Aaron, and they kept going back to playoffs and championship games, but they couldn’t get across the hump.”
Ex-Steelers running back Merril Hoge, who saw the team transition from Chuck Noll to Bill Cowher, had even higher praise for McCarthy, who’s won a Super Bowl and gone 174-112-2 as a head coach. That record equates to a .608 winning percentage.
“If you built a resume — his resume — and didn’t attach a name to it, and you said, ‘Now what would you think about this coach if he did this in the National Football League?'” Hoge said. “Everybody who has any respect and understands the National Football League would be like, ‘That has Hall of Fame material around it.'”
Of active head coaches currently with an NFL job, McCarthy ranks fourth in wins, behind only Andy Reid (279), Payton (184) and John Harbaugh (180).
This article originally appeared on Steelers Now: Analyst Offers Lofty Praise for Steelers HC Mike McCarthy: ‘Hall of Fame Material’
