Three-time Pro Bowl running back Le’Veon Bell, who spent five seasons under Mike Tomlin with the Pittsburgh Steelers from 2013 to 2017, couldn’t resist reacting after his former head coach’s secret hobby finally went public. A reposted clip from the gaming account FearBuck shows Tomlin walking through the detailed interiors of his virtual high-rise apartments.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
“We were tryna win Super Bowls and coach T was on Minecraft building cities 😭,” Bell wrote on X.
The joke lands because of just how long Tomlin had actually been hiding this. The former Steelers coach revealed in a September 8 interview with TODAY’s Craig Melvin that he’d been quietly building the same Minecraft city for 12 years, meaning the hobby dates back to roughly 2014, squarely in the middle of Bell’s own run in Pittsburgh.
“I’m a big Minecrafter,” Tomlin told Melvin at the time. “I started playing Minecraft, man, when my kids were young. I have a Minecraft city on creative, man, that I’ve been working on for like 12 years.”
Tomlin explained he originally picked up the game as a way to connect with his kids during downtime, and kept the project alive as a form of relaxation even as his sons grew older and the family’s console setup moved from PlayStation 3 all the way to PlayStation 5. His children reportedly became the ones maintaining the file across those console transitions, since Tomlin has admitted he doesn’t have the technical know-how to manage it himself.
What started as a passing mention on live television turned into a full reveal this week. On Wednesday, Tomlin launched a YouTube series called “My 12 Year Minecraft City Build,” with the first episode focused on rooftops, penthouses, and high-rise living in his downtown district.
The scale of Tomlin’s creation was even bigger than the initial story suggested. The first tour featured a boutique hotel, restaurants, a CVS pharmacy, multiple stadiums, and other buildings spread throughout the virtual city. His oldest son, Dino, has also said the full tour had to be broken into sections because showing everything at once would have taken around two hours.
Dino reportedly filmed the tour at his father’s request, and Tomlin walked viewers through small design choices he’d made over the years, including his attention to realistic amenities for the city’s virtual residents.
“I was always really conscious of appropriate amenities,” Tomlin said in the video.
Bell’s reaction captures the surreal gap between Tomlin’s public image – 19 seasons as Pittsburgh’s head coach, a Super Bowl XLIII title with them – and this entirely separate side project, running quietly in the background the whole time.
Tomlin now works as an NFL analyst for NBC, giving him far more free time than his old coaching schedule ever allowed, which he has clearly used to keep working on the project he started years ago.