Steelers Now
Heyward chimed in and said, “Give him a microphone and now everyone is paying him to talk. He’s gonna have a lot of fun with that.”
Tomlin will be joining the Football Night in America broadcast team for NBC Sports this fall, following his retirement from coaching in January, and on Sunday, he broke his silence about his decision to step away from the Steelers and coaching.
Tomlin, in his debut appearance on NBC, sat down with Maria Taylor during Sunday’s NBA Showtime pregame show to break the news publicly about him joining the broadcast crew and discuss his decision to step down after 19 seasons leading the Steelers. Taylor asked Tomlin if there was a “blink” moment that caused him to decide to leave coaching at this time.
“It’s probably not an overnight decision, but it’s probably not something that I could articulate or share with people,” he said. “There’s a loneliness with leadership. I just thought it was a good time for me personally, and by that, I just mean where I am in life. I thought it was a good time for the organization, to be quite honest with you. We didn’t have a lot of success in the playoffs in recent years and there’s just some veteran players there, man, guys like Cam Heyward and T.J. Watt and [Chris] Boswell, that I thought were worthy of the excitement and the optimism associated with new leadership.”
Freeman was floated as someone the Steelers should pursue during the team’s coaching search this past winter.
Freeman made it clear he has no desires of going to the NFL right now, however.
“I’m the head coach at Notre Dame,” Freeman said during a press conference. “I said this before. Individual recognition, individual success, NFL interest — those are all a reflection of team success. And where this football program is, I’ve used some of the interest from the NFL to personally gain wisdom from some of the GMs and front office executives that you get a chance to talk to about your players. And what they view as a successful coach.”
Freeman added that he didn’t have to reconsider his situation.
“Everything I want and everything I need personally can be achieved right here as the head coach of the program,” Freeman said.
This article originally appeared on Steelers Now: Why Mike Tomlin’s Legacy Goes Beyond the NFL
