Year: 2021

A look at the first weekend of the NFL’s first 17-game season:

—This is the first test of the NFL’s new vax policy. It says 93 percent of the players are vaxxed. Will any key unvaxxed players – notably Kirk Cousins – test positive the day of game?

—The season opens Thursday night with the defending champion Bucs hosting the Cowboys. The fact the Cowboys got this marquee assignment shows the league still considers them ratings gold. But will they make a game of it with Dak Prescott seeing his first action in almost a year? It also pits Cowboys defensive coordinator Dan Quinn vs. Tom Brady. Quinn, of course, was the Atlanta coach in Falcons’ 28-3 meltdown vs. Brady and the Patriots. Bucs are 7.5 favorites.

—In the other two primetime games, the Rams are seven-point favorites over the Bears on Sunday night and the Ravens are four-point choices at the Las Vegas Raiders on Monday night. None of the three primetime underdogs had a winning record last year, although Chicago made the playoffs at 8-8. You would have thought the league would have had better primetime matches for first weekend of the season.

—In the late games Sunday afternoon, CBS has Jim Nantz and Tony Romo doing the Browns at Kansas City and Fox has Joe Buck and Troy Aikman doing the Saints-Packers at Jacksonville. The game was moved because of damage done by Hurricane Ida in New Orleans.

—Three rookie quarterbacks drafted on the first round will make their first starts. Trevor Lawrence of the Jaguars is a three-point choice at Houston and Mac Jones of the Patriots is a 2.5-point pick at home against Miami. Zach Wilson of the Jets is a 5.5-point underdog at Carolina, where he will face former Jets quarterback Sam Darnold. The Jets traded Darnold after drafting Wilson.

—Jones will start against Miami’s Tuo Tagovailoa. They were teammates on the 2018 Alabama team along with Jalen Hurts, who will start for Philadelphia. Alabama lost the national title game that year to Clemson and Lawrence by a 44-16 margin. The Patriots-Dolphins matchup is critical because they are both likely to be chasing Buffalo in the AFC East.

—Kansas City will unveil its new offensive line when the Chiefs host Baker Mayfield and the Browns. The Chiefs’ inability to protect Patrick Mahomes was a major factor in their Super Bowl loss to the Bucs, and they have revamped it. Now they have to show if they can protect Mahomes.

—Besides the Rams-Bears, Chiefs-Browns and Saints-Packers games, the other game featuring two playoff teams from last year is the Seahawks-Colts matchup.

—Buffalo, touted as possibly to top AFC threat to foil Kansas City’s bid to make the Super Bowl three years in a row, opens against a Pittsburgh team that had a meltdown at the end of last year. Ben Roethlisberger will try to show he has something left in the tank.

—The Giants and Washington have a short week upcoming because they play the Thursday night game to start the second week. Both open at home, so the Giants will have a short road trip.

The NFL is a quarterback league and now that preseason is over, one of the major questions about the upcoming season is whether a fresh start can make a difference for six veteran quarterbacks.

Let’s look at six of them in new roles this year:

— Matthew Stafford and Jared Goff. They were virtually traded for each other. Stafford never won a playoff game in Detroit and had a 74-90-1 career mark while making one Pro Bowl. The Rams are hoping he will make them a Super Bowl contender. Goff played on a better team with the Rams and made the Super Bowl but seemed overmatched in loss to the Patriots. He did get a second contract, but after making only one playoff appearance the last two years and losing it, the Rams decided they needed to upgrade the position. Detroit hopes Goff he can make them a contender, but those hopes may be unrealistic.

—Jameis Winston flamed out two years ago in his fifth year in Tampa Bay with 30 picks to go with 30 touchdown passes. He moved on to New Orleans backing up Drew Brees last year and won the job this year after Brees retired. He has big shoes to fill and Saints face a lot of challenges since they won’t be back in New Orleans for a month while city recovers from Hurricane Ida.

—Teddy Bridgewater got off to a solid start in his first two years in Minnesota but then suffered a devastating ACL that limited him to one series in two years and he moved on after the team did not pick up his option. He went to the Jets but was traded to the Saints before he played for them. After two years with the Saints and one with Carolina, he moved on to Denver where he beat out Drew Lock for the starting job. He has to play well to keep Lock on the bench.

—Andy Dalton is one of five quarterbacks to lead his team to the playoffs in his first five seasons, but he failed to win a playoff game in the four games he played in for the Bengals. Then after going four years without a winning record, including an 0-8 start that led to his benching in 2019, he was released in 2020 after the Bengals drafted Joe Burrow. He signed last year with Dallas as Dak Prescott’s backup. He went 4-5 as a starter after Prescott was hurt and moved onto Chicago where he beat out rookie Justin Fields for the starting job. He will have to play well to keep Fields on the bench.

—Tyrod Taylor has bounced around and landed this year in Houston, his fifth team, where he got the starting job because Deshaun Watson’s career is in limbo. The problem is that he doesn’t have a good team around him. They went 4-12 last year even with Watson. Two of the wins were against 1-15 Jacksonville. Taylor faces a tough task as he tries to turn his career around.

It will be interesting to watch how these six veterans fare this year. Can any of them become a long-term answer? We will see.

Terry Brennan had one of the most unusual coaching careers in the history of college football.

His hiring at the age of 25 to take over one of the most prestigious coaching jobs in college football at Notre Dame shocked the college football world in 1954.

It was the first major decision by new president Fr. Theodore Hesburgh and showed times were changing at Notre Dame.

Brennan then pulled off another surprise, proving he was a good coach as he overcame the school’s slashing of scholarships to bounce back from a 2-8 record in 1956 and post one of the most storied victories in the school’s history – the 7-0 victory at Oklahoma that ended the Sooners’ 47 game winning streak in 1957.

And then he was fired at Christmas a year later after going 6-4, a move that was even more shocking than his hiring five years earlier, and Fr. Hesburgh never really explained why he sacked him. The move apparently even took athletic director Moose Krause by surprise.

And then he never coached again, turning down head coaching jobs at Maryland and Colorado and an offer to be an assistant to Vince Lombardi at Green Bay. It is intriguing what would have happened if he’d won those Super Bowl rings with Lombardi and what that might have led to.

But he never appeared to look back and had a good life as a TV analyst, businessman who had a law degree and family man and has mostly faded from public view.

Then his children talked him into writing a book on his career, which led to the publishing of “Though the Odds Be Great or Small” written by William Meiners.

The book not only covers Brennan’s career, but the history of Notre Dame back to such legends as Knute Rockne, George Gipp and Frank Leahy down to the present day.

What we will never know is what kind of career Brennan would have had if he’s been coached another decade or so at Notre Dame. Brennan writes that he thinks the program was an upswing because Fr. Hesburgh abandoned his scholarship restrictions and no longer made the coach wait until April when the College Entrance Board results were in to offer scholarships.

“Those changes didn’t help me much, but it did my successors,’’ he writes in the book.

As it turned out, the coach Notre Dame hired to replace Brennan, Joe Kuharich, was a disaster, but they rebounded by hiring Ara Parseghian in 1964. He was only the third coach to coach the Irish for a decade or more. The first two were Rockne and Leahy. Lou Holtz was the fourth and the current coach Brian Kelly is the fifth.

Meanwhile, the administration whiffed on some hires, notably Gerry Faust, Bob Davie and Charlie Weis.

Notre Dame will never be what it once was as a football power because Fr. Hesburgh was focused on turning it into an Ivy League type institution and he succeeded. The average SAT score of a Notre Dame student is now 1475. Fr. Hesburgh once said he wanted to be a level with Princeton and the Irish are now close because Princeton is at 1505.

But Fr. Hesburgh came to terms with football at Notre Dame, realizing it was too important for the alumni to play football on an Ivy League level.

They can recruit good enough to be competitive on a major college level but can’t bring in very many blue chip prospects and won’t be winning a national title any time soon. They’re kind of like Stanford, which is completive but hasn’t won a national title since 1940.

As Brennan wrote of Hesburgh, “Hesburgh wanted to be the “education president” and he was. I don’t think he deliberately destroyed the football program, but he certainly didn’t understand it. In my opinon he did a very clever thing I’d call “modified secularism.” He bent the school towards secularism as far as he could without removing religion entirely. It was a good move and a good sell to big corporate donors and industries who were not necessarily Catholic.”

When he took over, Notre Dame had an endowment of $9 million. It is now $13.3 billion. He doubled the enrollment and 40 buildings were put up. The ironic thing is that Brennan probably would have been the perfect coach for the kind of school Hesburgh wanted Notre Dame to be.

Meiners writes that Brennan’s legacy is his family of six children, seven grandchildren and thirty-one great grandchildren.

Brennan, now 93, has seems to come to terms with his tenure at Notre Dame and has attended Notre Dame games.

But his late wife, Kel, made sure that none of their six children went to Notre Dame.

What is it like chasing a dream that always seems to elude you before eventually finding success in a direction that never crossed your mind?

That question is answered in the book “The Point After” by Sean Conley with the subtitle “How One Resilient Kicker Learned There Was More to Life than the NFL.”

Conley grew up thinking there wasn’t more to life than kicking in the NFL.

Growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, he was obsessed with becoming an NFL kicker even though at the time (1993) there were only 28 kicking jobs.

He was first intrigued with football when he tried in a Punt, Pass and Kick competition.

Even though he didn’t win, he writes, “I was eight and it was fun. That was the same outlook I would need years later. But I was hooked. That night, I began sleeping with my football.”

He felt, “There was one way to succeed and be happy and that was to play football.”

But the road was never easy for him. His high school didn’t have a team and he didn’t get to a Division I school until his senior year when he went to Pitt and won the job.

He made 16 of 19 kicks, was named to First Team All Big East Team, the First Team All-Academic Big East Team and nominated for the Lou Groza Award given to the best kicker in college football.

He wasn’t drafted but got into camps with three teams, but he couldn’t overcome the damage he’d done to his leg by overtraining.

He could kick well in the tryouts but then his leg was no longer strong enough to do it consistently. And he had to deal with a lot of pain.

He did make it through a short season in or the Scottish team in the World League of American Football. He made nine field goals in six games and got a $2,500 check for having the second-longest field goal in the league.

He is very candid about how difficult those days were when he was often broke, only spent $30 for wedding rings at a flea market and had five roast beef sandwiches at Arby’s for $5 on his one-night honeymoon.

Still, he didn’t want to give up. He contacted teams in the Arena League, which paid $500 a game.

He went to a workout with the Albany Firebirds and was offered a contract. What happened next is the most poignant scene in the book.

He told the executive he had to talk to his wife and they found a quiet spot under the stadium bleachers to talk.

“You always told me it was the NFL or bust,” she said “This isn’t the NFL. You played in the NFL. You’ve done it.”

“But I’m quitting,” he said.

“What else do you have to prove,” she said. “It’s hard watching you go through the pain.”

“I looked out at the indoor arena…Is this the end? My heart felt nothing. I looked back at Karen. I placed my hands on her shoulders.”“You’re right,” I said. “It’s time.”

They left without telling the executive because he feared if he went back to his office, he would be talked into signing.

So it was over.

And he suffered another setback when his father died of colon cancer.

But the book has a happy ending. His wife had a yoga studio but she got a teaching job and would have had to close it. Sean then decided to become a yoga instructor to keep the business going.

Their shop, Amazing Yoga, now has three locations in Pittsburgh.

He found out there was more to life than football. And he has written a captivating book about his journey.

He ends the book, “I am grateful for right now.”

The Buffalo Bills are the latest team in the NFL to play the stadium game.

Teams have been playing this game for decades, attempting to get cities and states to build them new stadiums. If they don’t get them the threat – implied or otherwise is that they will move.

But no team has ever asked what the Bills apparently want from the city of Buffalo – a $1.1 billion stadium plus $400 million to renovate the hockey stadium. And the husband-and-wife team of Terry and Kim Pegula, who own the team, reportedly aren’t offering to kick in any money.

At least that is what the Buffalo News reported. A spokesman for the owners said the figure isn’t accurate but didn’t say if it is less. Or even more.

What happens next is a critical question that may affect stadium building for years to come.
The negotiations should be fascinating. If the Bills get anywhere near a billion dollars, other teams will likely use that as a benchmark.

Nobody knows if this is just the opening bid from the Pegulas or if they are serious about not putting some of their own money into the stadium. On the other hand, the city and/or state officials aren’t going to kick in a billion dollars. But would they go for $200 million to $300 million? Who knows?

To put what the Bills are asking in context, no city has ever put up a billion dollars to retain a team. Las Vegas put up $750 million to build a new stadium to lure the Raiders from Oakland. Total stadium cost is estimated at $1.9 billion.

There is already speculation that Austin and San Antonio would be possible future homes of Bills, but it is hard to believe Jerry Jones would allow a third team in Texas.

St. Louis, Oakland and San Diego lost teams, so it is hard to imagine they would put up a billion dollars to lure the Bills.

And the Buffalo News reported the idea of taxpayers footing all the cost was a “non-starter” in Albany, the state capital.

Still Erie County executive Mark Poloncartz suggested there could be a compromise.

“It takes compromise on both sides and my goal is to get a deal done that is fair to all parties: Bills fans, to ensure the Bills are playing in Buffalo, but also the citizens of Erie County,’’ he said. “There is no blank check. Hopefully, there will be a compromise.”

He also said the Bills have never said, “If you do not give us what you want, we are leaving town.”

But they don’t have to say it. Many teams have moved when they don’t get what they want.
Most economists also say that subsidizing stadiums is a bad deal for the taxpayers.
But there’s more than economics involved. The Bills are such an integral part of Buffalo that losing them would be a devastating blow to the city and area.

The Sports Business Journal said the team will argue that staying in town would amount to a contribution by the team, but that argument would likely to fall on deaf ears.

So this is where things stand. The Buffalo News say the Pegulas want a deal done in a couple of months. That is totally unrealistic, especially since their lease doesn’t expire until after the 2023 season.

And things are in turmoil in Albany with Governor Cuomo facing impeachment if he doesn’t resign in the wake of sexual harassment allegations.

So which side will blink first? Will the Billls stay in Buffalo?

They should put the negotiations on Pay-Per-View.

It would seem logical for the losing team in the Super Bowl to win it the following year.

Which explains why the Chiefs are favored to win it all this year after getting routed by the Bucs 31-9 in last year’s Super Bowl.

But it is more difficult for a losing team to win the Super Bowl the following year than you might think.

It has happened only once since 1972 when the perfect Dolphins won it all after losing to Dallas at the end of the 1971 season.

That team was the Pats when Tom Brady led them to a victory over the Rams after the 2019 season after they lost to the Eagles the previous season.

Now Brady, who won his seventh ring with the Bucs last year, is trying to repeat for the second time while the Chiefs are going for their third Super Bowl appearance in a row after they beat the 49ers two years ago and lost to the Bucs last year.

The problem for the Chiefs in last year’s Super Bowl is that their offensive line was ravaged and Andy Reid, not noted a premier playoff coach, didn’t adjust and Patrick Mahomes was running for his life much of the game.

Reid is only 17-15 in the playoffs and 1-2 in the Super Bowl and also didn’t coach well when his Eagles lost to the Patriots after the 2004 season. Trailing by 10 in the fourth quarter, Reid didn’t go to the huddle late in the fourth quarter and took two much time scoring a touchdown and lost by three.

This is a pivotal year for Reid as he enters his fourth year coaching Mahomes. The Chiefs put a lot of emphasis on improving their offensive line. We’ll see if that effort will pay dividends.

Does Reid join the elite ranks of two-time Super Bowl winning coaches or does he fall short again?

The Chiefs are virtually guaranteed a spot in the playoffs but then things will get dicey for Reid.

Reid has established himself as one of the great regular season coaches but has won only one title in 21 years as a head coach with the Eagles and Chiefs.

Now he has Mahomes in his prime for several years. We’ll see if he can win more rings with him.

We live in an era when several top coaches won it only once with a premier quarterback like Sean Payton with Drew Brees and Pete Carroll with Russell Wilson and Mike Tomlin with Ben Roethlisberger.

Reid doesn’t want that to be his legacy.

The odds appear to be against the Tampa Bay Bucs repeating.

Even though they have Tom Brady and virtually the entire team back that crushed the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, the oddsmakers still have the Chiefs favored to win it all. Tampa Bay is the second choice.

That is because repeating is more difficult than you would think in the 21^st century. It hasn’t been done since Brady and the Pats won back to back after the 2003 and 2004 seasons. Brady would win three more Super Bowls with the Pats but didn’t repeat each time. And didn’t repeat after he won the first one so he is one for six while trying to repeat.

He is now attempting to join Terry Bradshaw as the only quarterback to repeat twice.

Among the quarterbacks who have failed to repeat since Brady did it are the Mannings, Peyton and Eli, Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson.

But if Brady does win his eighth and repeats twice, the Bucs have another challenge.

How do they top this year’s Super Bowl ring? They set a new ring standard.

Teams have been trying to outdo each other with gaudy rings in recent years, but the Bucs did something unique with a ring designed by Jason of Beverly Hills, a custom jeweler that has produced several rings for championship teams but had never done a Super Bowl ring.

The company CEO said the Bucs wanted to define what a Super Bowl ring looks like and since there comes a point where you can’t make them any bigger, he said you have to do better.

Their biggest innovation was the twist-off top, the first for a Super Bowl ring. On the bottom of the removal top, laser etched in gold, is the word HISTORIC along with a description of the fact the Bucs were the first team to win it on their home field.

When the top comes off, it reveals a handcrafted replica of Raymond James James Stadium. The left and right bands feature two panels, one customized for the player and other focused on the team.

On the top are two Lombardi Trophies in honor of the team’s two Super Bowl rings and it contains 15 carats of white diamonds and 14 karat yellow and white gold along with the team’s signature flag logo carved from red stone. The 319 diamonds represent the 31-9 final score.

Those are just some of the highlights of the rings – every person in the organization got one—and gives the players more incentive to repeat.

Imagine what that ring would look like if they do it.

Nick Saban’s legacy is that he is one of the best college coaches in NFL history.

He has won seven national championships, one more than Bear Bryant, who won six. And Saban may add more to his gaudy resume.

Yet there is one blemish on his coaching record that still seems to haunt him – his 15-17 record in Miami as an NFL coach in 2005 and 2006.

That record doesn’t diminish his reputation as a coach. Very few successful college coaches have won NFL titles. Paul Brown, Jimmy Johnson, Pete Carroll and Barry Switzer are the only four to do it and Switzer took over a team that won the two previous titles in Dallas under Johnson.

The signature moment of Saban’s short NFL career came when he bypassed signing an injured Drew Brees when he was a free agent and signed Daunte Culpepper. Brees, of course, went on to star for the Saints while Culpepper, who had knee injuries, was at the end of the line.

It was an obvious mistake by Saban, but he never takes responsibility for it. He blames the doctors for flunking Brees on the physical. Which wasn’t surprising because Brees arm was in a sling.

The interesting thing is that Saban doesn’t seem willing to let go of the narrative that it was the doctor’s fault that the Dolphins didn’t sign Brees.

He even brought it up again when Alabama linebacker Dylan Moses wasn’t drafted and signed as a free agent by the Jaguars. Moses missed the 2019 season with a torn ACL and then admitted he played last year in pain.

So it wasn’t surprising teams didn’t want to risk signing a player who admitted he played in pain last year and whose production dropped from 2018.

But Saban said the teams should have overlooked that fact he played hurt last year and drafted him. And then he brought up Brees and said it was another case where the doctors made a mistake.

“So I guess they (doctors) make mistakes, too,” he said.

Of course, we don’t know yet when they made a mistake on Moses until he proves he can play in the NFL on his damaged knee.

And Jason Cole, who covered the Dolphins when Saban was coaching them and said he enjoyed covering Saban, noted that Saban was in charge and could have signed Brees if he wanted to.

PFT made a similar point that Saban certainly could have found a doctor to give the green light to sign Brees if he wanted to. Sean Payton, the New Orleans coach signed him.

The larger issue is that Saban apparently can’t get over the Brees mistake.

But there’s one way Saban could still prove he can win in the NFL. He could leave Alabama and coach another NFL team. Certainly Saban would be in demand if he showed an interest in coming back to the NFL.

Of course, Saban isn’t going to do that. He has it too good at Alabama where he can recruit an unending stream of five-star players and usually has more talent than the opposing teams he faced.

So if Saban doesn’t want to coach in the NFL again, he should stop bringing up Brees as a reminder that his short tenure in the NFL wasn’t a success.

There is an old saying that owners own, coaches coach and players play.

For the San Francisco 49ers, things are a little more complicated and the roles are blurred.

That is why the 49ers’ decision to give up a third-round pick this year and their first-round picks the next two years to move up nine spots to draft Trey Lance with the third pick was a move with a lot of ramifications for the future of the team.

Yes, the same Lance who played just 19 college games at North Dakota State, just one last year.
And the team already has Jimmy Garoppolo, who obviously is no longer in their long-term plans.

Lance was one of the five quarterbacks drafted with the first 15 picks. The other four are Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields and Mac Jones.

We all know that not all five are going to make it big. That’s not realistic.

What we don’t know is which ones are going to live up to expectations and which ones don’t.

It is fair to say, though, that the 49ers and Lance are in the most interesting situation.
To start with, they have to decide what is Garappolo’s future.

Coach Kyle Shanahan made a statement before the draft when asked about Jimmy G that he had to backtrack on after the draft.

“I totally bombed that,” Shanahan said. “I hated how that came off. I talked to Jimmy about it right away. I didn’t realize (how it sounded) when I did it. A person (reporter) I have a relationship with who sometimes he asks me what I think is a silly question, sometimes I mess with him back, and that’s kind of what I was doing. That was between me and that guy, had nothing to do with Jimmy when I said, ‘I didn’t know if we’d be alive Sunday.’ ”

As if things weren’t complicated enough, owner Jed York said publicly he asked Frank Gore for his opinion on the quarterbacks in the draft and he endorsed Lance.

It’s unusual for an owner to ask a player for his advice. Gore played with the 49ers for a decade and is currently a free agent.

Gore also said he would be OK if Garoppolo played for two more years before his contract runs out.

Let’s sort this out. There is no way Garoppolo is going to play two more seasons and then walk away as a free agent. He will be traded either before or after the upcoming season.

The larger question is how good Lance is going to be. If he turns out to be another Carson Wentz, Shanahan and general manager John Lynch are going to have some explaining to do. They have put their future in Lance’s hands and need Lance to be an elite quarterback.

It is like they are walking on a high wire without a net as they prepare for upcoming season.

Bum Phillips was fired by the late Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams at the end of the 1980 season after he lost to the eventual Super Bowl champion in the playoffs three years in a row.

Two years later, the Oilers were 1-8 in the strike season of 1982 and then went 2-14, 3-13 and 5-11 in the next three seasons.

That may be the best example of why it is usually not a good idea to fire a playoff coach because he keeps losing in the playoffs.

And it brings to mind the often overlooked reality that the goal isn’t winning the Super Bowl. It is to stay in contention to keep the fans coming and avoid those two or three win seasons.

Which brings us to the case of Steeler coach Mike Tomlin and the team’s recent decision to extend his contract through the 2024 season.

Giving him that long of an extension wasn’t that popular in Pittsburgh because of his record in the last decade – just three playoff wins — but it is the Steeler way of doing things. They’ve only had three coaches since 1969 when Chuck Noll was hired.

And it was really a two-year extension because they already had an option for the 2020 season.

The extension came off a frustrating season when the team started off 11-0 and then collapsed, losing five of the last six including an ugly 48-37 playoff loss to a Cleveland team that was missing its head coach because of Covid.

Despite having a Super Bowl victory on his resume, he has an 8-8 playoff record and hasn’t won a playoff game in four years.

He missed the playoffs two of those four years.
In his last two playoff losses, the Steelers gave up 93 points although turnovers played a big role in both losses. They lost to a Jacksonville team quarterbacked by Blake Bortles, 45-42, in 2017.

Tomlin didn’t appear to have his team ready to play either game and in the 2017 loss to the Jaguars, the perception was that they were looking past the Jaguars to an AFC title game duel against the Patriots.

Tomlin even said during the season that the elephant in the room was that they would be playing against the Patriots. It was a game they never got to play and it is never a good idea for a coach to publicly look ahead.

The bottom line is that even Tomlin likes to say the standard is the standard and not winning in the playoffs for four years in a row is not the standard for a team that has won six Super Bowls.

Still, Tomlin has never had a losing season in his 14 years as the Steeler coach and his winning percentage of .640 is better than any active coach except Bill Belichick.

And my colleague Clark Judge has written Tomlin should be in the conversation for a Hall of Fame berth.

Meanwhile, things aren’t going to get any easier for Tomlin the next four years.

Roethlisberger is near the end, and the team doesn’t have anyone waiting in the wings to replace him. The team appears to be something of a rebuilding mode.

Steelers owner Art Rooney II appears likely to stick with him as long as he continues to avoid having losing seasons. He knows that changing coaches can make things worse instead of better.

For the Steelers’ spoiled fan base, though, winning in the regular season is not the standard. They are looking for playoff victories and Super Bowl appearances.

Tomlin needs to show he can once again meet that standard.